Tim Dower: Did you learn anything from last night's powerbrokers debate?

The powerbrokers’ debate last night – you learn anything from it?

Your impression of anyone improve, or did you feel the shine coming off someone by the way they conducted themselves?

I thought it was bloody awful myself, but I stuck with it because I kinda had to.

Let's forget the weird pub beer garden look of the whole thing, I just want to think about the substance of the, er, “debate” and the performance of the players.

From right to left on your screen:

Winston Peters - seemed to treat the whole thing as a bit of a joke...wasn't taking it at all seriously. Didn't do himself any good.  Almost like it was a rehearsal.  Nothing useful to say.

Debbie Ngarewa-Packer - Awful, just awful, so, pretty much as expected.  Behaved like a silly third-former – the patronising way she referred to Mr Peters as Matua obviously intended as a put-down, but water off a duck's back to Peters.

Marama Davidson - not a lot better than Packer banged on and on about a wealth tax that's not going to happen being the answer to, well, just about everything really. Message seemed to be: let's take money off people who've done something with their lives, give it to people who'll never do anything with their lives, and all our problems will magically be fixed.

Davidson at least was cogent and fairly coherent and I was wondering how much she appreciated all the buddy-buddy high fives and fist pumps, did I even hear 'you go girl' at one point? Silly Debbie. Sit down Debbie.

David Seymour – Disappointing. Should have been the star of the show, but he went on far too long, tried to set out policy details when this just wasn't a serious forum.  My suggestion: either say 'no' if you're asked to appear with the same crummy crowd next time, or turn up with a bag of random insults and just hurl those around.

Overall, I wanna say it's an hour of my life I'll never get back, and that's true, it's gone for good. What it confirmed for me though was that out of those four, there's only one I want anywhere near the Treasury benches in three weeks' time.

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