In recent weeks, the Otago Institute for the Arts and Sciences (OI) and Dunedin’s community access radio station OAR FM have joined forces to record 15-minute interviews with virtually all of the candidates for Dunedin City Council and the mayoralty.
The team of OI president Dr Barbara Anderson with OAR FM community liaison Jeff Harford and operations director Domi Angelo-Laloli, spent the past fortnight in the studio recording the interviews with 52 of the 56 candidates for council and mayor.
The topics for the long-form questions, which had been contributed by OI members with input from the OAR FM team, covered a broad range of topics, including Dunedin’s strategic vision, the role of councillors, community boards, the role of Māori in local governance, rates and rate caps, campaign spending rules, council and local tertiary institutions as well as perspectives on arts and culture.
Dr Anderson said the project had been positively received by candidates and had reached 75% of mayoral candidates and 92.6% of council candidates.
Those standing for both council and mayor were interviewed only once.
"We asked the candidates to keep the questions confidential, and everyone was very co-operative about that — so we think the process was as fair as it could be," she said.
Mr Harford said OAR FM was "tremendously grateful" to the institute for coming up with the idea for the interviews and to Dr Anderson for her efforts in making it happen.
"This project fits in very well to our kaupapa as a community access radio station.
"It was a huge effort, so we really thank Barb for her energy and commitment to driving it."
The candidate interviews are being broadcast now on OAR FM (105.4 FM and 1575 AM) on week-day mornings from 6am-7am, and are also accessible as individual podcasts via the OAR FM website oar.org.nz
Mr Harford said the aim was to make the interviews as accessible as possible across the community.
"We have done our very best to keep it fair to everyone," he said.
Now the council and mayoral candidate interviews are completed and being broadcast, the team is now turning its attention to the candidates for Otago Regional Council, with recording set to start on August 25.
Dr Anderson said the candidate interviews had been under the umbrella of the "OI Podcast", which had been an ongoing project for the institute for several years.
In recent months, the podcast has focused on a range of election-relations topics, including local issues, interviews with University of Otago politics Professor Janine Hayward on the single transferrable vote system, a chat with council chief executive Sandy Graham, and an interview with the Otago Regional Council deputy chief executive Amanda Vercoe.
