'After Ten’ a dull diet

Press, 4 August 1977, Page 15

'After Ten’ a dull diet

By GARRY ARTHUR

South Pacific Television’s new current affairs programme, “After Ten,” was not exactly compulsive viewing. In fact, it was touch and go whether the democratic process was going to prevail and the family would vote with its switching fingers to change to the other channel. Duty won, and we persevered. Perhaps it was the disappointment at getting an abbreviated version of Gordon Dryden’s “Thursday Conference” when we had been led to expect something entirely new. Or maybe it was the very unentertaining subject of unionism — compulsory versus voluntary. The ordinary unionist must have found the discussion very unedifying.

As Dryden himself kept saying, many people — even among his panel — had only a hazy notion of the difference between the “qualified” and “unqualified preference clause.” So why did he not explain the difference? If he had, some of his viewers might have been able to follow the discussion.

If the invited-panel format was ever entirely successful, I venture to suggest that it has now had its day. Viewers now know its many deficiences, and it has largely discredited itself. How many times have we seen such panels fail to come to grips with the subject under discussion? There are always people who show promising signs of being able to put their vewpoints across, but they are usually overlooked, sometimes shouted down, and rarely given the chance to develop a theme. The unionism discussion was like that. Mr Aussie Malcolm, the National Party labour caucus committee spokesman, had some interesting points to make in defence of the Government’s union ballots policy, but there were some on which he would have been questioned more closely in a programme of different format. For example, he was asked what would happen to the Industrial Relations Act if unionism became voluntary. He dodged it, saying that such problems

would be sorted out “step by step.” Because of the big crowd of speakers waiting for a turn, there was no time to get him to elaborate.

Gordon Dryden had pretty clearly made up his own mind about the merits of the Government’s policy. He might well be right, but prejudgment is surely a luxury which a panel chairman can ill afford.

The representative of the Employers’ Federation appeared to be ill-at-ease, and again, because of the great cowd of speakers awaiting their turns, he was not pressed to commit himself.

The best shots were fired by a Labour Party speaker, who claimed that Mr Malcolm was not being as candid as he had been in an earlier discussion with him. Mr Malcolm had told him, he said, that the union ballots policy was “just a hangup of the Prime Minister’s.” “Need I say that I deny it?” asked Mr Malcom with a smile. “I expected you to, Aussie,” said the Labour Party man.

Keith Davis’s subsequent interview with Sir Thomas Skinner, president of the Federation of Labour, was largely predictable, but produced one or two sparks when Davis refused to take some of Sir Tom’s weighty pronouncements at face value. It was valuable, no doubt, for putting on the record his back-tracking on the hard line he had threatened earlier. Did it all amount to a deal with Mr Muldoon, the interviewer boldly inquired. Instead of bouncing him, Sir Tom laughed loudly and significantly. “After Ten” picked up considerably with its third and final segment — an up-beat examination of the boilermakers’ activities on the Bank of New Zealand skyscraper site in Wellington. Keith Davis was the commentator again, and may have overdone it a trifle with his “Untou-chables-style” delivery. No doubt the new-style current affairs programme will shake down into something pretty good, but let’s hope David Beatson can give us some variety in future. Unionism, unionism and more unionism made a dull diet.