Mike's Minute: What to expect from the first debate

It's debate night tonight.

As the campaign takes its next step in intensity, the unknown this year is the Luxon factor. We have never seen him head to head, unless you watch Parliament and no one does.

He has down played his credentials against a bloke who has spent his entire career in politics.

A lot of energy goes into these things. Having hosted a couple over the years, they get nervous and they spend a good chunk of the day preparing.

They arrive early and get given a specific room, on a separate floor, so they can hunker down with their aides and run prep some more.

Their aides spend too much time asking questions about who goes where and why and when and how. There is a lot of flapping around in terms of TV crew, especially given these days not a lot of big production TV is done live anymore, so extra resources are wrangled and that creates an atmosphere all of its own.

So, quite a bit to play for.

The media are invited and they settle into a separate area, or as we did at least once in 2020, they sit in the studio as part of an audience.

They get to quiz the participants after the event, it gets dissected and the theory is it leads the news the next day.

There will also be a poll tonight to set the scene.

That poll will almost certainly be bad news for the Government, which will all most certainly lead to the first question of something like, "why are you doing so badly in the polls?"

Quite a bit comes down to the moderator. Tonight's is non-combative. I am not sure she will look to hold anyone to account per se, or inject herself into proceedings.

But as a punter, what I want is less dribble and more fact.

Someone like Hipkins has a hundred lines down pat, he can babble incessantly and say nothing. It doesn’t serve him well but it fills time.

And that is the Luxon key to victory. He has a Government on the ropes and he has a litany of examples where things have gone wrong, if not disastrously. He has material for Africa.

Hipkins has costings on a tax policy and he milks that at his risk, given the fatigue factor of the past week.

There is normally no winner, which leads to the two separate camps.

One camp will think tonight is critical while camp two thinks its important, but hardly the be-all and end-all.

I am in camp two. It's possible the poll, if it's really bad, will outshine the debate.

Hipkins, given his position, needs to win.

Luxon, given his position, needs to look credible.

So no pressure then.

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