Steve Brawnius

It comes with text as well.

And that's what judges are looking at, I should think.

Well, outcry might be a little bit tabloid.

Why not?

Did you used to work at TV3 or something?

It's an anomaly, which, you know, is a sort of a thinking person's synonym for outrage, right?

There's an anomaly in which New Zealand, possibly alone in the world, or there must be other territories which do it.

But we appoint someone from overseas to help the fiction judges come up with the winner.

And we've been doing that for 10 years, ever since Occam took over the sponsorship, and also, more to the point, ever since Jan Medlicott took over.

who died a few years ago, a lovely woman, bequeathed with incredible generosity, a vast amount of money, $65,000 a year, you know, to go to the winner of that prize.

And she certainly supported the idea and advocated it of getting someone in from overseas to help a Kiwi panel decide it.

I don't know if it was her initiative.

I don't know if it was on her say-so, but she was into it, and it's been established ever since.

And it's not a crime.

No one's...

No one's died or anything.

But some people find it, and you can't blame them, that the optics are bad, I guess.

It does reek of cultural cringe and it talks to our inability to make up our minds and casts us as rather childish.

I interviewed a number of judges over the past few years and

One of them had a problem.