Do you have any further guidance around what does and doesn't fall under it? Just picking

up on Michael's point, sometimes the boundary can be a bit blurry though.

Some of our listeners might remember the Planet Key saga from the 2014 general election.

and that iconic video of then Prime Minister John Key playing a Maui's dolphin as a guitar, the video and the song sort of mocking Key in the lead up to the election.

Ultimately, the Court of Appeal upheld the overturning of the Electoral Commission's ban on the song and the accompanying music video as an election advertisement.

saying the Commission should have taken a more rights-sensitive approach in its assessment.

In other respects, though, the definition is very clear, such as the medium doesn't matter.

That said, There's a little exception related to election programs, which is essentially another word for election ads, where these will go straight to the BSA rather than being considered by the broadcaster in the first instance.

We've got provisional results, we've got final results, but when are the official results released and how does that happen?

Well, the Commission will declare the official results by legal notice in the Gazette, and the Commission may declare these on a rolling sort of basis, electorate by electorate, or declare multiple electorates, or declare all the list MPs on the same day according to whether it considers it most appropriate.

And so the ballot papers themselves are sealed and held for six months.

and then destroyed.

So as soon as possible, after declaring the results for every electorate, the commission will endorse the writ that we've talked about in previous podcasts and transmit that to the clerk of the House of Representatives.

And as a quick refresher, the writ is just a formal constitutional document recording the names of every constituency candidate declared to be elected separately to this the commission also needs to determine how many list seats each party is entitled to having worked this out the commission must then work out which candidates are entitled to the list seats based off each of the party's lists and then those candidate names are then declared again In a new notice in the Gazette, which is forwarded to the Clerk of the House of Representatives, this process happens largely in parallel with the returning of the writ, with the official results.

They're all pretty self-explanatory, but if we start with

the electorate vote recount, these happen automatically if two candidates end up tied and one extra vote could decide the seat.

to make decisions, and that's for several reasons.

At a practical level, the period before a general election is usually characterised by a period of reduced decision-making capability at the ministerial and Cabinet level.

Well, ministers are slightly occupied by a thing called an election campaign.

By convention, in the three months before the election, the government will usually exercise restraint in making significant appointments.

And then immediately after the election, one of the two arms of the caretaker convention applies, depending on the outcome of the general election.

And we'll talk about that a little bit later.

In the past, the length of the caretaker period after a general election has varied from a matter of two weeks, if we think about the Labour majority in 2020, to two months with the infamous 1996 election and the negotiations between New Zealand First and National.

It's all yours, Mark.