With hospitals and schools falling apart and nurses and teachers crying out for better pay, why is the Government planning to spend $38 million putting more television programmes online?
The answer to this question may be found 30 years ago, when the fourth Labour government of David Lange and Roger Douglas decided New Zealand could not afford a BBC-style, taxpayer-funded television channel.
"Too expensive," said Labour broadcasting minister Jonathan Hunt, rejecting National’s 1990 election campaign pledge of a non-commercial channel.
"It costs about $120 million and that would be the whole of the licence fee plus a lot more."
The licence fee of $110 per TV-owning household was scrapped by National in 1999. Replaced by general tax revenue and channelled through government broadcast funding agency New Zealand on Air, it became an annual subsidy of about $80 million for television programmes and $38 million for Radio New Zealand. Now, the new Labour-led coalition Government has promised another $38 million for "public media" which, up until last month, was to include a non-commercial, BBC-style television channel.
Extremely vague in purpose and design, this channel originated in a proposal the largest television drama production company, South Pacific Pictures, presented to the board of Radio New Zealand in August 2011. This "unique and exciting opportunity" was called the "New Zealand Public Service Television Channel". With video cameras capturing interviews in RNZ’s Auckland and Wellington studios, the channel would continue to commission content that had been on TVNZ 6 and 7, Labour’s first response to continuing demand for serious news current affairs programming on television.
The cost to the taxpayer of TVNZ 6 and 7 was $15 million a year and the RNZ channel was expected to cost half that at $7 million to $8 million. But the decisive factor, just as it was 30 years ago, is not cost but politics. While most of the television is made in Auckland, the critical decisions over its ownership, regulation and the all-important taxpayer subsidies that underpin its commercial viability are made in Wellington.
Among the interesting parallels with the last time Labour tried to fill the gap created by the lack of a non-commercial television channel is in the role played by the Member for Wellington Central.
After taking the seat off Act NZ’s Richard Prebble in the 1999 General Election, Marian Hobbs was promoted into Helen Clark’s Cabinet after just three years on the Opposition benches as a Labour list MP. As broadcasting minister, she brought with her an ambition to turn TV One into a fully non-commercial channel. That was stifled by the Cabinet’s imposition of a "committee of experts". Instead, she was allowed to impose a charter on TVNZ and start up two new channels, TVNZ 6 and 7 which posed no threat to the commercial channels’ dominance of revenue-rich prime time. Disillusioned, she gave away the broadcasting portfolio to Steve Maharey in 2003 and the two new channels were eventually scrapped by National in 2011.
The verbal stumbles that quickly earned Marian Hobbs the media nickname of "Booboo — the fifth Teletubby" were nothing compared to the bumbles that almost immediately sparked calls for the resignation of Clare Curran.
While the media focus has been on her ill-advised coffee date with RNZ’s head of content (since resigned) Carol Hirschfeld, the competence of Labour’s new Minister of Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media is called into question by her handling of the creation of yet another layer of bureaucracy to administer funding.
Announcing the membership of an advisory group — to advise on the establishment of a new funding commission — Ms Curran withheld vital information about its role and purpose.
Incredibly, given Ms Curran’s designated ministerial responsibility for open government, two of the five functions in the group’s terms of reference were censored and a third was partially redacted. Also censored was the first of the group’s five "key roles" and the name of one of five appointees, subsequently identified in Parliament as William Earl. A broadcasting consultant engaged by RNZ for its proposal to use downtime on Parliament’s television channel, Mr Earl would have had an obvious conflict of interest.
Although secrecy on the spurious grounds of commercial sensitivity is not unusual in the broadcasting sector, the minister’s decision to withhold basic information about a group responsible for allocating $38 million to competing public and private media companies borders on obsessive.
But she retains the backing of her Prime Minister who, like Helen Clark before her, is also minister for arts, culture and heritage. The ministry produced the figure of $38 million, presumably with expert advice from New Zealand on Air. The ministry shares an office tower with RNZ which is just up The Terrace from the Treasury and within walking distance of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), which has interests in broadcasting from its early days as the Post and Telegraph Office.
All are within the Wellington Central electorate where the current member, Grant Robertson, is also Labour’s finance minister and, unlike his predecessor, Michael Cullen, is a strong and vocal supporter of taxpayer-funded public broadcasting.
It is his first Budget next month and he and his Prime Minister are ultimately accountable for choosing to invest $38 million on video rather than health or education.
- Tom Frewen is a former Otago Daily Times reporter and also a former parliamentary reporter.
