I’m a “political animal”

The Herald on Sunday reports:

Welcome to One News – if you’d like to know how Australia’s elections work, we’re completely incapable of telling you.

That seemed to be the problem for presenter Simon Dallow when he fronted a segment on our closest neighbour’s electoral system.

As an instructional, the Friday night broadcast told viewers little that was accurate about the 1200 candidates vying for the 150 seats in the House of Representatives and 40 of the 76 seats in the Senate.

In fact, it used a completely different voting system to explain what 14 million voters – of 22 million citizens – would be doing with their votes.

The mistake was picked up by political animal and blogger David Farrar. He told Kiwiblog readers: “What a pity they got it so wrong. Simon Dallow, who fronted it, should send an angry-gram to whomever produced that item.”

I wasn’t aware political animal was a formal descriptor!

Throng report an apology from TVNZ:

We’re looking into how we got this so very wrong and sincerely apologise to our viewers for the very embarrassing mistake.

Kudos to TVNZ for being upfront.