The Hollow Men: Our Democracy or Theirs?

On March 27 2007, over 200 people turned up to a CTU public forum in Wellington on election campaign financing.  Speakers included Nicky Hager, journalist and author of The Hollow Men, Therese Arseneau, Department of Political Science, University of Canterbury and Andrew Geddis, Faculty of Law, University of Otago, as well as a number of comments and discussion points from the floor.  (For more information on the 2007 election funding debate, visit this page on the CTU website).

A podcast of the event is available below.

Downloads/Links:

• Podcast of the evening.  Audio files from the forum are below.  The first half of the forum (the welcome and three presentations from Nicky Hager, Andrew Geddis and Therese Arseneau) are available for download now.  Right click on the files and choose "save file as" or "save target as" to your computer. 

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Nicky Hager is an investigative journalist and author of four books, most recently The Hollow Men. He will be speaking about why so many people feel turned off by modern politics and what  can be done in New Zealand to change that.

Therese Arseneau is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Political Science and Communication at the University of Canterbury. She specialises in New Zealand and Canadian politics and is a regular media analyst for television and radio in both Canada and New Zealand. In 2005 she was an election night analyst for TV3. Dr. Arseneau will be speaking about the importance of elections to a healthy democracy and will examine the role of the media and other players in the electoral process.

Andrew Geddis is an Associate Professor in Law at the University of Otago and specialises in electoral law and campaign financing.  He is the author of "Election Law in New Zealand: Practice and Policy" (LexisNexis, 2007). He will be discussing flaws in the present legal regulation of election campaign funding and proposing reforms that might address these shortcomings.