When Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith announced last month that the Broadcasting Standards Authority would be disestablished, the predictable chorus of alarm followed: standards will slip, the public will lose protection from ‘‘harm’’, the news media will run wild sowing the seeds of dissension, envy, hate.
The truth is the opposite. Scrapping the BSA is one of the most sensible regulatory decisions this government has made, and it should proceed without hesitation or half-measures.
The BSA is a relic of 1989, a statutory body designed for a local media landscape of three television channels and a handful of radio frequencies, where broadcast spectrum was scarce and the state could plausibly claim a gatekeeping role given it had a significant market share.
That world no longer exists.
Kiwis today flick seamlessly between linear television, on-demand streaming services, news websites of record like the ODT’s with rich content including video, podcasts, YouTube and other social media outlets. Chat channels on gaming platforms, AI-driven apps and other emerging channels are rising in popularity and importance.
Yet the BSA’s jurisdiction covered only a shrinking sliver of this landscape — the ‘‘broadcast’’ portion — meaning identical content could be regulated if watched live at 6pm but entirely unregulated if streamed an hour later.
A regime that treats the same words spoken by the same announcer differently, depending on the pipe they travel through, is not a sound system. It is an accident of legislative history.
Even the BSA itself conceded the problem.
The authority spent years telling successive governments that the boundaries of its jurisdiction were no longer clear and that the Broadcasting Act was hopelessly outdated.
When a regulator admits it cannot tell who it regulates, the case for its continued existence has already begun to collapse.
Worse than its obsolescence was its overreach. Faced with an evaporating mandate, the BSA did what dying bureaucracies usually tend to do: it expanded.
Its 2025 decision to assert jurisdiction over podcasts and online media providers was a naked regulatory land grab, made without any clear legislative authorisation by Parliament, and it rightly provoked dismay across the political spectrum.
The principle is simple: in a democracy, the state and its quangos should not be in the business of adjudicating the tone, balance and ‘‘good taste’’ of journalism and commentary.
Outside of a Stalinist dictatorship, this is the bailiwick of editors, presenters, commentators, and voluntary industry codes to manage.
And, ultimately, for audiences alone to adjudicate upon.
And audiences are perfectly capable of doing it. The most powerful regulator of any media outlet in 2026 is the off switch.
The minister was mocked for saying people who dislike a broadcast can ‘‘just turn it off’’, but he was stating an obvious truth that the complaints industry and the apparatchiks employed in it prefers to ignore.
The typical BSA complainant was not a vulnerable citizen seeking redress for genuine harm: it was more often an ideological objection to a viewpoint, weaponising a process to punish speech the complainant disliked.
Disestablishment will not create a lawless vacuum. New Zealand’s print and digital publishers have self-regulated through the Media Council for decades, and the sky has not fallen.
Extending that model across all journalism, regardless of platform, finally delivers the consistency the old regime never could: one set of expectations for the same content, however it is consumed.
Defamation law, the Harmful Digital Communications Act, the Human Rights Act and the Films, Videos and Publications Classification regime all remain in force for material which genuinely warrants a civil or criminal remedy. That which incites crime, or smears reputations through spreading untruths.
The defenders of the BSA argue that self-regulation lacks teeth. But any system’s legitimacy comes from public trust, not statutory compulsion.
And trust is built by credible outlets of record such as this newspaper, that correct errors and uphold codes because their reputation depends on it, not because a tribunal might fine them $5000.
Thirty-seven years was a respectable run. The BSA belongs to the era of the cathode ray tube, and it should be retired with it.
Now that every citizen blessed with the gift of speech along with a device, a social media account, and internet connectivity can be their own one-person micro-broadcaster, the BSA’s day is over.
The government should pass the repeal legislation swiftly, trusting Kiwis to judge the merit in what they watch and listen to for themselves.
• Paul Foster-Bell is a former National List MP and New Zealand diplomat who now works for the University of Otago. All views expressed are solely his own.
