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Transcripts copyright to Front Page Ltd but may be used PROVIDED attribution is made to TVOne and Agenda. AGENDA Presented by LISA OWEN

LISA	The government has given Auckland local authorities just two weeks to agree on either Eden Park or the proposed waterfront stadium as the venue for the World Cup Final in 2011. if there is no agreement the government will divert its funding to Christchurch's Jade Stadium, the government's justifying its heavy handedness and it's more than 250 million dollar investment by arguing the stadium will be a key part of its economic transformation programme. Coincidentally Trevor Mallard the Minister of Sport and Recreation is also the Minister of Economic Development, he joins me now. Good morning Minister, how is the stadium going to deliver economic transformation?
TREVOR MALLARD – Minister for Economic Development
	Well I think Auckland's at a tipping point now as to whether it wants to be a world class city or whether it's going to continue to slide backwards and there's a big investment to be made, either it can be made at Eden Park or it can be made on the waterfront if it is to be made in Auckland. If we want a coordinated approach one with good transport, something that can link up to a proper conference centre, one which can take a variety of events we want the waterfront opened up, very much in the way that the Viaduct was opened up by the Americas Cup, this is an opportunity, not one that the government says Auckland has to take but one which I would hope that they wouldn’t pass up.
LISA	But your own cabinet papers that you released early in the week says Auckland's critical to economic transformation, we need world class infrastructure, security of power, energy supply, world class public transport system, why not put the money into that.
TREVOR	Well a lot of money is going into all of those things, there is a lot of money going into Auckland roads, we're seeing quite a bit change around the electricity in the way that it is coming into Auckland, and that’s going to be very important, there are some gas things that are clearly being worked on as well, but with a stadium you’ve sort of gotta make a decision about whether you're going to link it into improved transport, you know have it by Britomart, have it by the ferries, have it within 20 minutes walk of 22,000 carparks, 3,000 hotel beds, or whether you're going to put it at Eden Park which I think would add pretty severely to gridlock problems especially if you increase the size.
LISA	So back to the economic transformation though, how is the stadium going to deliver that, where are the high skilled long term knowledge economy jobs in the stadium?
TREVOR	I think cities which have stadia are more likely to attract people, cities that have real events, I mean what we've found is in Wellington the Sevens and the Hurricanes in our stadium have become real social centres for the city and a lot of people not only come to Wellington but live in Wellington because of those events. Now Auckland doesn’t really sort of capture that festival approach. There's actually quite a lot of good research on it, Richard Florida has done some work into what makes a world class city, what attracts people to it and it is often those soft things more than money and maybe even more than weather that makes a difference.
LISA	Well what message does it send when you're talking about economic transformation and you're going to take over part of a very busy productive working port that handles a third of the country's container shipments, what message does that send when you're all about economic transformation?
TREVOR	A tiny sliver of the port and my view is that, and certainly the advice that I've had is that a more efficient rail system going into the port will more than make up for that loss. Now clearly there needs to be a small wharf extension to Bledisloe to make sure that that works but the ability to move containers in and out by train, modern ports run about 70 to 80% of their containers in and out on trains, I think Auckland did about 30%, so if we can do that you can then have a lot fewer containers on the wharf, and free up land for things which are more important than storing containers.
LISA	Well you said that you intend legislating around the Resource Management Act, so are you going to legislate around any legal problems that you possibly face if you get any resistance?
TREVOR	Ah, no, I mean essentially the suggestion is that whether it is Eden Park or a waterfront site there'd be a system put in place where there are both informal and formal hearings that there are experts or an expert who helps prepare a consent and what it does is shorten the process but it means that people will have their say and there will be reasonable conditions whichever approach is taken.
LISA	As Geoff Vasey from Ports of Auckland has pointed out they do have legal rights when it comes to the appropriation of land and they could exercise those.
TREVOR	Well the government certainly is not going to appropriate the land, I mean they have owners of course and their beneficial owners are the Auckland Regional Council on behalf of the people of Auckland, if they make a call to go in a particular direction and they will only make that if they're certain that the port is going to be able to work well, we can help them frame that transaction.
LISA	What about Ngati Whatua have you got them on board?
TREVOR	October 19th the Chief Executive of Ngati Whatua gave his blessing, he effectively said there is a settlement in that area, this is not part of the area – it's not a claimed area and they do want to be involved in design and clearly they'd like to have some influence on it going forward but it's not a Treaty claim issue.
LISA	So when Pita Sharples said that the tangatwhenua had been snubbed again that this is absolutely typical of a consult when it suits government and the people will not forget this, has he got it wrong?
TREVOR	Yep.
LISA	So Ngati Whatua 100%, not just one person, the board.
TREVOR	What I'm saying is that we did the proper thing, we approached the Chief Executive of the Board and that’s the approach for us to take happened on October 19th and that person indicated that there was not an issue there.
LISA	Pita Sharples has also said that talking to one person is not talking to the iwi.
TREVOR	And that’s right but it's actually not our responsibility as far as the government's concerned to decide what consultation that person should have with the rest of the iwi. I think all of us know that in the absence of Sir Hugh there is still a bit of a vacuum there as to systems and approaches, but I'm sure that can be worked through.
LISA	Why is the government getting involved with this at all, should it be building a grandiose waterfront stadium anyway or is this Think Big in another guy?
TREVOR	No I think we've just got a choice here, or Auckland's got a choice, Eden Park which is buildable.
LISA	But the government supports the waterfront proposal.
TREVOR	Yes, but it's not an absolute thing, it's a strong preference it's a preferred option you're absolutely right, but we've gotta make a call about whether roughly 400 million goes into Eden Park or roughly 500 million into a new national stadium.
LISA	But those figures are questionable aren’t they Mr Mallard because you haven’t factored into there the costs of the money that you're gonna have to compensate the port with.
TREVOR	That’s right and it's a question of whether we compensate or not or whether it's part of the ARC contribution and then is really a paper transaction because the ARC will be part owners of the stadium.
LISA	Is it going to turn into a big white elephant? Beyond a rugby final how much value is it going to have for us in terms of its use? Telstra Stadium in Sydney only fills up three times a year on average.
TREVOR	And if you have a stadium that only worked when it was full of people inside then clearly it would not work, I mean it's got to be designed in a way where it can have week to week use for exhibitions, for restaurants inside, restaurants round the seafront, round the edge, and shops, it's gotta open the access up to the harbour.
LISA	You already have those things down at the Viaduct Basin you’ve got restaurants and places for people to go.
TREVOR	Yeah and I was down there a couple of Fridays ago and there's some enormous queues at about four in the afternoon to get a meal, I think as Auckland redevelops there is room for more and more of that and if we can have a city that’s open further along then that will be good as well.
LISA	Some of Labour's own MPs have told this programme that they think this stadium is a giant billboard for Labour's brand of economic transformation, is it that, is it so that you can point at that stadium over there and say that’s economic transformation come election time?
TREVOR	No, no, what it will do is say that Aucklanders made a choice, they decided to have a better investment on the waterfront rather than gridlock a suburb.
LISA	Where's the consultation been on this project, you’ve got ACT, Greens, Maori Party, they're all opposed, United Future is sceptical, I mean how confident are you you can get National's support to get this thing moving?
TREVOR	Well we've worked pretty closely with people over a period of time, kept people in the loop.
LISA	How confident are you about National's support?
TREVOR	I'm confident that the votes will be there for enabling legislation on resource issues.
LISA	What about this public submission process or lack thereof, two weeks you say people have got to decide, I mean how are you going to gauge people's desires, with a Herald poll with a text campaign?
TREVOR	Well the Herald poll clearly doesn’t ask the question either, I think that the real question is should it be on the waterfront should it be at Eden Park or should it be in Christchurch, you know that is the real question that people are being faced and I think it's one of the times when the ACC and ARC counsellors are going to have to step up get out consult, get the views of people and come back and I'm sure they're up to that.
LISA	You risk perhaps going down in history as Labour's version of Sir Robert Muldoon, Think Big gone wrong.
TREVOR	I don’t think there's any danger of that.
LISA	You yourself said yesterday though that your job is on the line over this.
TREVOR	Well I think my job's on the line if we don’t have a stadium to run a World Cup Final in and I'm absolutely confident that we will, we can go as late as July 2008 to Jade Stadium, have a 60,000 seat stadium there, I don’t think it would be as good, because I think that Christchurch is not as good a city for hosting something like this, I think that Christchurch is not the dynamic city, the city of the future for New Zealand that Auckland is and can be, but if we've gotta go there we will.
LISA	So at the end of all of this you think you'll still have your job?
TREVOR	Absolutely confident.
LISA	No along with Trevor Mallard we're joined with a special guest panel, Alex Swney, Chief Executive of Heart of the City a lobby group for Auckland Central Business District, Rob Fisher, Chairman of the Eden Park Development Committee, and award winning architect Gordon Moller, the man behind Auckland's Sky Tower, welcome to you all. We'll start with you first Rob Fisher if we could, can you just take us back a little bit, what did the Eden Park Trust Board expect that it had to do to meet IRB requirements?
ROB FISHER – Chairman, Eden Park Development Committee
	When the successful bid was announced we were told we needed 60,000 people at Eden Park and we needed a new south stand, so that was our brief and we started work I think two days after the successful winning of the bid.
LISA	So that project was about 150 million it costed out at?
ROB	Well we didn’t do the costing, the bid remember was put in by the government and the Rugby Union so they'd done their costing and we started from scratch if you like. An early decision we made is that it didn’t make sense to put a whole lot of temporary seating in when we had to build a bit new south stand.
LISA	But that basic concept of some temporary seating that had been signed off by the International Rugby Board as an acceptable proposal?
ROB	No no the IRB said they wouldn’t accept a 55,000 capacity with temporary seats, they wanted 60,000 and a new south stand, so that’s what we set out to do.
LISA	But doesn’t that raise the question of whether you’ve brought some of this on yourself by getting more complex with your proposals coming up to a proposal that was 320 million dollars and then a Rolls Royce proposal from you, if you went back to the original concept you might not be in this position.
ROB	Well Trevor probably knows better than I, we can't go back to a temporary in 55 unless the IRB said that was acceptable, so when we sat down to look at it we had a bit new south stand it looked fantastic and then our acoustic engineers and our planners said but look the noise and light will get out into the neighbourhood you’ve got to contain that hence the idea of the east stand, so one other point, in the original figures at the time the bid was put in they'd left out important things like escalation and contingency, so those sorts of things had to be added on top that’s how the 320 was arrived at.
LISA	Trevor Mallard if they went back to the original more simple proposal would it be no contest then, the waterfront stadium would be out of the running?
TREVOR	Well I think we wouldn’t have been having this discussion if the costs were around the level that we thought they were earlier on.
LISA	Which was?
TREVOR	My understanding was 150 million dollar figure was the one that was in my head, I actually thought that it was done on the advice of Eden Park but I stand to be corrected there.
LISA	So why can't we just go back to that then?
TREVOR	My understanding is that it didn’t have all of the proper containment measures in there, it'd be almost impossible to get resource consent for and I would have some pretty bad effect on the neighbours for something which in the longer term wouldn’t be that flash.
LISA	Neighbours like Helen Clark.
TREVOR	Helen's at the point where she lives at a reasonable distance away and she's made it clear that she on balance is not strongly one way or the other on this because clearly as far as she's concerned you know she wanted to make sure that the buildability issues worked and as she says you know now she's got Eden Park as a neighbour she knows what she's got, and if you have something else you don’t know what you’ve got.
LISA	Let's bring in Alex Swney, Heart of the City, what difference is this really going to make to Auckland's economy to put a bit waterfront stadium down there in central Auckland what difference is it gonna make?
ALEX SWNEY – Chief Executive, Heart of the City
	Well we're talking about big city changing levers here, we're talking about starting to perform on the international stage and look – in life you can actually just bring up as many objections and reasonable as they sound, but at some stage leadership and governance requires bold moves. Tax an rates by their very nature are subsidies across communities and across generations and we can bring today's problems to this table here and we will never do anything. This is a chance to finally break through after 100 years through that red fence that’s kept Aucklanders from its waterfront and say here we are let's start to transform it, let's put a big piece of international infrastructure here, let's get exciting, let's get a little bit sexy, let's start playing on an international field rather than just figuring why not everything?
LISA	Let's bring Gordon Moller in here because I think he might say that you're not necessarily breaking through the red fence you're putting up another barrier, why not the waterfront?
GORDON MOLLER – Moller Architects
	Well because Auckland waterfront is at a very delicate stage in terms of how develop say over the next 20 years, I think the Viaduct harbour has been fantastic, the Americas Cup was the catalyst for that, and now we've got people living working and playing down on the waterfront that’s great. We've got Wynyard Point which is at a very crucial point and the Ports and the Auckland City are working hard on that and the Regional Council as well. So the other remaining part is that from Queen Street and Queens Wharf through to Bledisloe which is the container terminal, and in my view what we need to do is to make sure that the city connects with the harbour as best it can. Ports or waterfronts around the world have shown as the port changes because of the changing pattern of shipping now at the container ports it's freeing up waterfront for people to have access to, and you know as Alex says for many years in New Zealand we've had big high fences we can't get at the waterfront, here's our opportunity to do so.
LISA	By presumably a stadium would mean a bit high barrier too.
GORDON	Yes a stadium is very specific in its need, and I commend the government and Trevor Mallard in terms of the efforts that they're putting in to make sure that we have a world class venue, totally support that. What the issue for me is that it's the wrong building in the wrong place. A stadium by its very nature is something like 35 metres high, 60,000 people to be able to get good sight lines close to the touchline etc, it's gotta be high, it has very specific requirements of getting people in and out of it and it's only used three times a year. So I totally support the initiative of providing more infrastructure for Auckland, but I don’t think that the waterfront stadium is the one it's gonna create a huge barrier between the harbour and the city and particularly Britomart which you know the city has spent huge amounts of effort in developing.
LISA	Let's put that to Trevor Mallard, you're taking down one wall and putting up another if you go ahead with this stadium.
TREVOR	Well it depends whether there's access around it or not, I mean clearly it is a visual barrier although sort of less of a visual barrier I would have thought than the current Bledisloe arrangements are where there's just not proper sight lines through there, it's tall but about half the height of the cranes which are currently working there and I think the key will be the access around the outside, the ability to do more of what's happening around Viaduct Harbour as far as restaurants and bars and shops are concerned down there. You know part of the test for me is you know will kids be able to fish off the edge of it, in fact hopefully there'll be some fish there to catch as well. So that sort of approach rather than it being an absolute barrier and I think there are questions around how designs can be shaped and softened.
LISA	You yourself have said that there's still much design work to go on though.
TREVOR	Oh a lot of design work to go frankly on Eden Park or on that one, I think my understanding is that for costings for example they do it when they're 75% complete and we've got June and August dates for that for the two alternatives.
LISA	Gordon Moller, do you think enough time has been put in to designing the structure that we see, this proposed waterfront stadium?
GORDON	I'm sure the government has the right advice to make decisions or make recommendations that they're doing. I think more importantly it's how it evolves from now on. The paper this morning it's hard to know if that’s an accurate rendition of what the government is looking at, it's hard to know, but what I would say is that any stadium such as this has a certain footprint that is required just to get 60,000 people plus the rugby ground. You have to consider a stadium is rather like an industrial building or even like an airport terminal in the sense that most of the action happens at levels 2, 3, and 4, because of the tiered seating, because of the rugby ground itself. Ground level is normally almost like an industrial interface, the other thing is you have to get 60,000 people in and out. When you get them in it's over a two to three hour period so that’s reasonably well staged, when you get them out or in a fire it's much different. So Trevor Mallard talked earlier about putting other activities around the base and that would be good but to make a significant urban design interface that is to allow all people to have that sort of access would need to be considerable and I would suggest that the footprint that’s shown in the paper is not large enough because of the promenades that are needed. I mean if you look at our stadiums around the world, Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane has huge prominence, if you look at Westpac it has huge promenades on the southern side and of course the other issue here is you're loading and unloading the stadium from one side only so it makes it critical. Now these may sound like detail issues but they're absolutely fundamental as to how well these buildings work, so we go back again and say that this is a building that is it really in the wrong place in terms of the relationship of the water to the city and the access for all people not just people using it 20 times a year.
LISA	Alex you were saying these details aren’t that important let's get on and be bold but Gordon Moller says if you don’t get this right it won't work.
ALEX	Yeah look, it's a cheap shot to say just ignore the details you're right, but today we don’t have a final plan and all I'm hearing is reasons why we should not move forward, why we do not want to accept this offer, why would Aucklanders not want to accept Trevor coming to us and saying here's 500 million dollars for a large economic activator that will activate our waterfront. I take Gordon's view that it may not quite be in the right place but Trevor you're right this model can move along the waterfront and we're saying it should be on the waterfront, there is a case for a 100 million dollars case for it for instance moving to Bledisloe just to save the piling charges, so what we're saying is a semi industrial structure in a semi industrial port, so you know it's an industrial wasteland today. What we're doing is we're putting the stadium out here and we are book ending our waterfront, and we're saying that’s the point that we turn our back on the ports and we liberate this, because if you look at the waterfront map, there is – you know the claim that we're the City of Sails, we're more like a city of ports today and we're saying let's get the public access going here.
ROB	Let's cut in here, I'm sorry Alex the decision that the Minister has posed to the two councils is do you want to host the Rugby World Cup Final in Auckland and if you do where's it gonna go, the decision they have to make is waterfront – we haven’t got time to move the thing up and down the waterfront.
ALEX	Actually it's waterfront or Eden Park.
ROB	It's a lot more specific than that, you’ve gotta remember the site has to be available and that isn't fixed yet, so is it doable in the time and is it going to be done at a reasonable cost. I've got this pile of documents that took nine months to get to this stage, we've had our costing done by three firms of Quantity Surveyors none of whom were actually the one that have done the stuff for the government, so a question actually I'd like to ask you Trevor is will all the technical stuff that you’ve relied on to date from your people be made available to both councils and also to Eden Park so that we can help with the assessment?
TREVOR	Well I'm not sure that Eden Park has the role for the councils, there is a call for the councils to make, now certainly the people from Fletchers from Ryder Hunt Warren and Mahoney are being made available, there Romulus Engineers I think are people who have been doing a lot of work on it and that will all be made available. The interesting thing is that with the two approaches many of the people who have been involved are the same people and I think that’s …
ROB	You’ve actually asked if we would make our people available.
TREVOR	And I want to thank you very much for doing that I think it's been useful in making sure that we have had the best possible comparisons, to have the people who were being involved in both and frankly we want the A teams working on whichever stadium it's going to be. We don’t want the B or C teams at all.
ROB	I totally agree with that and that’s why we're making our A team available but as I said the Quantity Surveyor firm that you’ve used has not reviewed the Eden Park costs. I can tell you that our people have already looked at the Ryder Hunt costs and have found a lot of issues, so we're not going to deal with this in any confrontational way because we want to make the right decision for Auckland, but we do need to make sure that the councils have the facts and frankly I cannot see how the cost of the stadium on the waterfront just for the superstructure building 15,000 more seats at Eden Park can be the same, that just does not make sense.
TREVOR	Well I think there are some answers to that and part of them go to the access, the ability to build at different times of the day, the predicted fewer problems with concrete going off because you’ve got better access, the thing that you're building a whole thing rather than building round things, there are lots of those details that have been explained to me, because you know I ask these questions too, I say how the hell can you do it.
ALEX	But you know here we are involved, we're involved in a costing decision you know, 100 million dollars there, 20 million, I don’t want to be trite about this but Rob a week ago we were involved in a similar discussion like this and you said to me at the time, if a case can be made for the waterfront you would welcome it that it could be done in time.
ROB	I still say that, but I want to see…
ALEX	Now the case is to let's make that, now we've got some milestone dates in that one there, let's get going Trevor and let's meet those milestones and if that’s the case you'll be with us.
GORDON	With the Auckland waterfront we've got major issues, the eastern end of the waterfront has been well and truly stuffed up opposite the container port with the Quay Park and we don’t want to see that happen again, we've got a major investment in Britomart by Council and by others, the Britomart is going to be blocked off… I'm just saying to you why it shouldn’t be on the waterfront, we've got an important relationship between the hinterland of the city and the water, presently between Queens Wharf and Bledisloe we've got two wharves, we've got water right back at Quay Street
ALEX	Ohhh…Trevor sorry we can't make a decision here, send it to Jade.
GORDON	I'm just saying to you that my pick would be that that footprint will extent through to Queens Wharf before its finished, as the design evolves particularly if people want to have more issues other than the stadium on the edge, it'll be a lot bigger it'll join Bledisloe to Queens and that’s a good piece of historic waterfront that’s gone, that could be available ….
LISA	Let's give the final word to Trevor Mallard.
TREVOR	I do disagree with that I think that a really important part of the concept is the fact that you link up the cruise ship base with the stadium, I think it's something which is very important to its economics, it's very important that we lose you know the shocking way that tourists get on and off their ships here in Auckland at the moment, and I think it does get down to a pretty simple question for Aucklanders, is there room for a bigger vision in Eden Park or not, and that’s a call for Aucklanders to make and then if people don’t want either then in fact it actually makes it a lot easier and a lot cheaper for the government, it just means that the statement that New Zealand makes to the world around Rugby World Cup is that we can't quite do the big thing.
LISA	Okay we're gonna have to leave it there, thank you very much to Trevor Mallard and to our panel for joining us today, Auckland had two weeks to make their voice heard.
LISA	Earlier this week Saddam Hussein was sentenced to hang for his role in the torture and killing of hundreds and Shiites. George W Bush claims the verdict vindicates his decision to invade Iraq despite the fact that there is no end in sight for the war on terror. Dr Mahathir Mahamad who once described Bush as the most hated resident in history was Prime Minister of Malaysia for over 20 years, during that time he promoted a model of moderate Islam with western economics, but that doesn’t mean he agrees with the western approach to Islamic terrorism. I spoke with Dr Mahathir earlier this week and I began by asking him whether he thought putting Saddam Hussein to death was the right decision.
DR MAHATHIR MAHAMAD – Former Malaysian MP
	Well I think that it was not a fair trial, a trial that is conducted by your enemy is not likely to be fair, and we set up a group to oversee the trial and we find that his lawyers were actually murdered and he was often sent out of the court. In any case the judge was presiding initially who appeared to be siding with him was removed and another judge almost a hanging judge was appointed and I felt that certainly he's going to be found guilty and sentenced to death. That doesn’t reflect well on the system of justice that the US promotes.
LISA	So what will that mean if he is put to death in this way, politically what could happen?
MAHATHIR	His followers and they are quite substantial will continue to hate the west the Americans in particular, and whenever they can I think will try to seek revenge.
LISA	George Bush he described this as a major achievement for Iraq's young democracy, so is he wrong then?
MAHATHIR	I think George Bush has got a different view of things completely, when they failed he was telling everybody that he had won the war, you must remember that he went to Iraq to declare that they had defeated Saddam and they had achieved success but now the whole world says that he has done a very bad job, now he's still saying the same that he has done a good job.
LISA	If in your view full scale war in Iraq is not the way to do what is the answer in Iraq?
MAHATHIR	Now using force is not the right thing to promote democracy, you have to educate people and democracy's not the easiest system to work and I hate to compare it but if you compare the number of people killed by Saddam and number of people killed as a result of George Bush's invasion of Iraq I would say that Bush has done a worse job than Saddam. People are not yet capable of understanding – the ordinary people understanding democracy and if you want to have a democratic system people must understand the limitations of democracy and it should be implemented gradually.
LISA	So if George Bush is responsible for the deaths of so many people does that make him a terrorist too?
MAHATHIR	Well if you consider that a person who terrorises is a terrorist then the people of Iraq they are being terrorised by the prospect of being killed, being bombed, being rocketed, and to me anybody who terrorises is a terrorist.
LISA	What is the best way for the west to counter Islamic militancy, what can the west do?
MAHATHIR	The problem has always been because of the situation in Palestine, before there was no such conflicts in the Middle East as serious as you see now, but when they decided to take Palestinian land and declared the state of Israel and expel the Palestinians from that state then of course you will cause people to be very very angry, frustrated and living as refugees is not helping them to feel comfortable with the ideas of the west, so they will continue to be against the west for as long as they cannot go back to their old country, they can have a say in the running of their own country.
LISA	So are you saying that the destruction of the Palestinian state is at the root of all of these problems?
MAHATHIR	Yes I think so, that was the initial cause of all the problems that you see in the Middle East today.
LISA	To what extent do you think that the US's policy in say Iraq and Afghanistan have added to problems with terrorism?
MAHATHIR	It has made matters worse, in fact we know that the whole world was against the invasion of Iraq but Bush and Blair decided that they should go ahead and disregard the opinions of the United Nations even, so this is the problem and basically it is due to what happened to the Palestinians.
LISA	When this war started you said that it would expose the world to more acts of terrorism, so have you been proved right?
MAHATHIR	Yes I think so, in fact before they invaded Iraq I wrote letters to Bush, Blair, Chirac and Schroeder saying that it will worsen the terrorist situation by invading Iraq and today we see something happening that is worse than what I expected so they are handling this problem in the wrong way they don’t seem to understand. Bush certainly doesn’t understand anything about other people.
LISA	If we look a little bit closer to your home, Indonesia, is there a danger that we could see more attacks like the Bali bombings, could it happen again?
MAHATHIR	Well there is that possibility, we cannot dismiss it but I think if we could resolve the Palestinian problem and show less antagonism towards Muslim on the part of countries like the US and Britain I think there would be less possibility of instances in Indonesia.
LISA	Is the Palestinian problem going to be solved in your lifetime. You're in your 80s is it going to be solved in your lifetime?
MAHATHIR	Well I don’t think it would be solved in my lifetime, I don’t know how many more years I have but I think the first step should be taken now.
LISA	What are those first steps?
MAHATHIR	Just to recognise the fact that the root cause of the present problem in the Middle East is the creation of the state of Israel and Israel's subsequent occupation of the whole of Palestine, they have their settlements there, there'll be wars there and if the Palestinians kill one Israeli they are going to destroy one whole village.
LISA	So what do you see as New Zealand's role in the region, New Zealand's role in preventing terrorism and terrorist attacks?
MAHATHIR	To talk about the need to recognise the causes of this problem and to adopt a much more reasonable view of the situation rather than to be like some countries keep on blaming only the Muslims for their not being reasonable.
LISA	Does New Zealand have a reasonable view on this in your opinion?
MAHATHIR	Yes I think your view is quite different from that of Australia, before we used to identify New Zealand and Australia together as having the same viewpoint, but today New Zealand is far more concerned about peace and non proliferation of nuclear weapons and things like that.
LISA	Looking at your own country at Malaysia the Bumiputra policies or affirmative action, why did you come up with these policies and do you think they achieved everything that you wanted to?
MAHATHIR	When we became independent there was a great deal of disparity in terms of wealth and economic prosperity within the indigenous people and the Chinese in particular, and we feel that racial difference in itself is going to cause conflict, but when racial differences accentuate that by differences in economic status then the possibility of conflicts is much greater.
LISA	So your policies did what?
MAHATHIR	Well we tried to correct this imbalance and we have succeeded so much so that even during the financial crises Malaysia was stable, other countries affected by the financial crisis were less stable.
LISA	So did you achieve everything you wanted to with those policies?
MAHATHIR	Not quite, I think more needs to be done but certainly we have removed most of the extreme disparities within the different races.
LISA	Thank you very much for you time this morning Doctor.