The younger ones are NOT impressive at all. Their questions are not questions, they are attempts to disparage and humiliate, they are not searching and reveal nothing. They are highly immature in their approach to the profession and in their journalistic acumen.

The Press is a fundamental institution of democracy which is why it is so important that maintain a non-partisan approach to their reporting, and why it is critical that they refrain from reporting from the perspective of personal opinion, a mode which has become the standard in New Zealand. To call the younger members of the press gallery impressive is naive in the extreme, but I suspect being in Adelaide you don't suffer form the same over exposure to the breathless Guyon Espiner and the Garnering Duncan.

In an election year it is imperative the opposition tell the voting public honestly and openly what it is standing for, not to throw up a smokescreen over it's dearth of policy.

"Even if you assume one is as credible as the other, I still don't get how Clark sits on this until yesterday. "

Anyone who has ever worked a day in their life KNOWS implicitly, you NEVER open your mouth until you know what the shot is.

It would have been completely foolish for Clark to breath a sound about this before she'd heard all sides, and collected as much info as she could.

It seems that the public expectation is that just because John Key and every overexcited news reporter in the country is all up in a blue funk about something, that the Prime Minister is duty bound to rail off about every gossip and rumour that comes steaming up from the gutters of Parnell.

The PM is not accountable to the leader of the opposition, nor to an immature press gallery. The PM is accountable in the first instance to the principles of natural justice and in the second instance to the people of NEW Zealand. Bill English and Lockwood Smith have done a fine job of showing how much trouble shooting one's mouth can create. They, and their media apprentices are clearly lamenting she didn't do the same.