Television New Zealand Amendment Bill

I return to the core of what the Television New Zealand Amendment Bill is about, which is the public good. Before this debate is out, I would be very keen for the Minister in the chair, the Minister of Broadcasting, to respond to the question that has been put to him on a number of occasions as to why, if this bill is aimed at providing archived works to the whole of New Zealand, the 83,000 households that do not receive Sky will not be able to access them. I ask the Minister to actually respond to that question before this debate is out.

As of 30 June 2010 Sky had a total of 802,397 subscribers. At that time the number of households in New Zealand was 1,632,200. That meant that 83,000 of those households did not get Sky, which is equivalent to around 2 million New Zealanders. That is very important because it is about equity, the public good, and who gets to see these important archived works that are the substance of this bill and are the essence of what makes us New Zealanders: our past and how we have developed.

The claim that it is in the public interest that they be seen again has been made a mockery of since TVNZ Heartland was launched, which is now exclusively for Sky to screen heritage programming. As a number of speakers tonight and previously have mentioned, those heritage programmes were all made by paid license fees, so in fact the public has already paid for the production of those programmes through fees and taxes. Now the public has to pay Sky for the privilege of watching them again, and the Sky shareholders get to reap the rewards.

I know that a number of my colleagues have mentioned some of those programmes, and I will mention them again. One of the people in those programmes is very dear to my heart, and I have launched a bit of a campaign to attract him to come back home from over the Ditch. It is John Clarke—or Mr John Clarke, as he is described on Twitter, where we have the occasional conversation—aka Fred Dagg. He is a cultural icon in New Zealand and he has become a cultural icon in Australia. It is a damn shame that he did not stay in New Zealand—

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: “If it weren’t for your gumboots”.

If it were not for our gumboots, where would we be?

💬 Hon Rick Barker: Sing it.

I will not be singing in this House. I pay special tribute to Fred Dagg. A few members on this side of the House would put their hands up if they were asked whether they modelled themselves on him.

💬 Carol Beaumont: Who are the Bruces?

There are also the Trevs. We have at least one of those on this side of the House, although he claims he is not one of those Trevs.

Then there is Lynn of Tawa, David McPhail and Jon Gadsby, and Billy T James, who brought Māori comedy to the fore in the early 1980s. There was our first enduring situation comedy, Gliding On. Then there were those iconic programmes, some of which have been mentioned, like Pukemanu—

💬 Hon Rick Barker: Close to Home.

—Close to Home, Gloss, and Shortland Street. I cannot say I spend a lot of time watching Shortland Street, as I do not get much time to do that, but there are many other award-winning efforts. Where are they now? Where are those sorts of programmes now? Where is the will to make those sorts of programmes in this country? I am interested to hear a bit more from the Minister about that.

The point is that that was critical television during an important time in our heritage, and it should be an important time now. Instead, there is very little likelihood of those sorts of programmes being made in this country again.

Removing the important TVNZ charter is the reason why Labour opposes this bill. It was extraordinary that the Minister of Broadcasting got up in this Committee and talked about the bill making an honest broadcaster out of TVNZ. Somebody said to me today that that is like taking the same moral grounding as a pimp welcoming the legalisation of prostitution.

If the Minister of Broadcasting is interested in being honest, then I ask whether he can show us where in National’s manifesto for 2008 there was any indication that the charter, and TVNZ 6 and TVNZ 7, would be scrapped. Could he explain why he continues to refuse to release the documents outlining TVNZ’s proposals for investment in TVNZ 7 and the TVNZ business plans for 2010 and 2011? If he is interested in being honest, then what has he got to hide? And why, at the 2010 Screen Production and Development Association conference, did he indicate that he wanted to retain TVNZ 7? What happened?

💬 Hon Members: Got rolled.

Well, what else are we meant to think? As I said in my second reading speech on this bill, there is significant weakness here.

Can the Minister tell us whether he genuinely agrees with his Cabinet colleagues, who oppose the continuation of the funding for TVNZ 7? I ask why he continues to ignore the concerns of the 61 academic researchers who took the unprecedented step of writing an open letter calling for a public debate on public broadcasting issues—a really important debate. Why did he try to mislead the public in the ambiguity of the findings of the officials’ watered-down report on broadcasting competition, and why did he and his Government ditch the digital review in 2009?

I wonder why he does not open up these issues for a proper debate, where all of the arguments, the evidence, the public interest, and the public good could be given proper consideration. Surely, a Government that is too scared to look at the evidence can hardly claim to be interested in honesty.

I think the Minister said that the only alternative to scrapping the charter was to fully fund TVNZ at a rate of $300 million a year. That is absolute rubbish, and he knows that. Under his watch, we have seen TVNZ 6 close down. We know that TVNZ 7 is facing closure. But if one does the calculations, one sees it would cost only 1c per person per day to save those channels. I think it has been calculated as costing less than a cup of coffee per person per year. TVNZ Heartland again has appeared exclusively on Sky.

Some really important, quite significant, and quite disturbing issues have been raised during this debate. The Minister has suggested that the Opposition missed the announcement on the radio spectrum licence fee deferrals in 2009, but when that decision was announced, it came in the context of several smaller broadcasters that were finding times tough in the recession. What was not apparent until very recently was the scale of the MediaWorks deal. If the Government was being open and honest, as it claims it has been throughout this debate, then why did it not reveal the real reasons behind the deferral decisions? It was only when those recent Official Information Act documents were made available that it became apparent that the Government had bent over backwards to ignore the advice of its own advisers in Treasury and the Ministry of Economic Development.

What an intellectually loose, if not somewhat poisonous, contribution from Labour’s soon-to-be-sacked broadcasting spokesperson. It was intellectually loose on a number of fronts.

I checked her figures closely. She repeated a couple of times that 83,000 households in New Zealand were without Sky TV. Well, I think Ms Curran needs to check her facts. Then we had a long, rambling discourse going through the history of New Zealand television. You know, if we take 1.6 million households and we subtract the just over 800,000 households that have Sky, we do not get 83,000. I am very surprised, because that member reads laboriously and continuously from prepared notes, but she does not have the wherewithal and the wit to pick up the most basic error. If she does not know the most basic fundamentals of the numbers in this whole equation, how can we rely on anything else she said?

She went on to make out that the National Government was not honest on issues of broadcasting, yet she was fundamentally misleading the House—misleading the House—by trying to make out that this archiving scheme would result in all those archived works being shown on pay TV—

💬 Hon Rick Barker: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I thought I heard the Minister say—I could not hear it clearly because of the catcalling from the other side—that the member was deliberately misleading the House. It is wrong to say that and to accuse a member of that. If the Minister did say that, then I think he should withdraw it. If he did not, I accept the clarification.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I thank the member for that. The word “misleading” was certainly used, but I do not think “misleading the House” was. But I just caution the Minister. The Minister is to be very careful with the use of that word.

Well, just like that member got the figures badly wrong about the number of houses with and without Sky TV, she also got it really badly wrong in that she does not understand the fundamentals of this Television New Zealand Amendment Bill. That is the truth of it. She is telling the public, and apparently this is not deliberate, that this bill will free up archived works to be shown only on pay TV. Anyone who has read the bill—and I do not know whether this member has read the bill—will know that it is freeing up works that can be shown only on free-to-air television.

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: How many households don’t have Sky?

They can try and shout down the argument, but I have the microphone.

The other thing that is really interesting is that that member over there, Clare Curran, basically harangued us for doing away with TVNZ 7. I can tell members why I think she is very soon to be sacked. Phil Goff was on the radio yesterday, and just like he had to sack Brendon Burns, I think when he hears how his spokesperson has gone on tonight he will have to have a word with her. Phil Goff was asked yesterday how Labour felt about this bill and whether it would support it. Phil got the first bit right; he said that Labour would not support it. He was then asked whether Labour would put more money into TVNZ, and whether it would save TVNZ 7. He said: “Well, you know, look, I can’t make a whole series of promises at this time until I’ve seen the whole picture. I mean, we’ve got to focus on helping people struggling with the cost of living, we’ve got to get rid of that deficit, and then we’ve got a series of things that we would want to do, and that may include TVNZ.”

Well, is that not the point? Basically, $79 million over 6 years went into that channel. The Labour Government had no idea how it was going to continue to fund it. It had made no allowance for it. It had said it would be self-funding. In the end it is not. We are left with one heck of a problem, which we have solved. What would Labour members do? Would they bring it back? Will Clare Curran be stupid enough to contradict Phil Goff tonight and get up and promise that Labour would fund TVNZ 7? I challenge her to do that, but I bet she will not. She would be hauled into Phil Goff’s office tomorrow if she did and told: “Sorry darling, you have just added another cost, another unfunded promise, on to the list of what will be a very heavy load strung around our neck at the next election.”

Fundamentally, this bill brings honesty. Here is another thing Phil Goff said yesterday: “You know, if we’re totally honest, you have got to say it is hard to see much on TV1 that is public service.” So Phil Goff actually gets it. But, of course, because ideologically he is stuck in a time warp in the wrong party, he has to go along with this Labour Party charade that the TVNZ charter actually did something. [Interruption]

We can tell by the cackle and the shouting from those members that they know they have lost this argument intellectually. They know the charter never did anything, they know fundamentally they would not bring it back, and they know they would not fund TVNZ 7, because they know they could not afford to. They have no intention of doing that. They had the chance to push through a regulatory review, but they left it to us. They deferred it, they deferred it, and they deferred it, because they knew that at the end of the day it was not publicly palatable. No one wanted that review. When we took power we were up front and honest about it. All they can do is criticise us for doing something they never had the guts to do themselves. So that spokesperson is totally out of step with her leader.

This is a great bill. If Labour members had any sense they would vote for it.

When the Television New Zealand Amendment Bill comes into force—I think that is the terminology—and receives the Royal assent, New Zealand will lose our public service broadcasting channel. We will be the only country in the Western world, with the exception of Mexico, that does not have a mainstream public service television channel. TVNZ will exist for the sole purpose of returning a profit and a dividend to the Government. We have to ask what the point is in a State-owned broadcaster that has no public service functions or responsibilities. What is the point? We predict that once this bill comes into effect we will see less and less New Zealand content on television, because TVNZ will exist to chase ratings, to make money, and to return a profit. It will be indistinguishable from any other commercial broadcaster. It will not make New Zealand programmes. Why not? For the simple reason that it is much cheaper to import foreign programmes, so there will be less and less New Zealand content.

In fact, we will probably see so few New Zealand programmes on TVNZ that people will be forced to look to the archives to try to get some New Zealand content. All of the discussion about the wonderful programmes that were made by TVNZ that are lodged in the archive at Avalon made me realise that a number of programmes that I made will be in the archives at Avalon: three television documentaries that I made will be lodged there in the archives, and the whole series of That’s Fairly Interesting—a programme about quirky events that were happening in New Zealand at the time. Those are historical programmes that people would love to see. There is no equivalent to those programmes now being made by TVNZ, so people will be very keen to look at those archival New Zealand programmes because we will see fewer and fewer New Zealand programmes on air.

The irony is that those wonderful archival programmes will not be screened on TVNZ, whatever the Minister says, because the sole mandate of TVNZ is to chase ratings—not to show programmes for the public interest but only for the commercial interest. It will only be showing programmes that the sales department approves because they attract advertising, and those wonderful archival materials and programmes that we have been talking about tonight will not be screened on TVNZ, because they will not attract the advertisers so the sales department will not be interested.

So we will join the shameful ranks with Mexico of countries having no public service broadcasting. Once this has gone through, the Government will turn its mind towards weakening and undermining our other public service broadcaster, Radio New Zealand. The intention of the Minister is to starve Radio New Zealand of funding, weaken the organisation, put it on the back foot, and force it to commercialise. The agenda is absolutely clear and absolutely blatant, because this Government and this Minister do not understand the importance or value of public service television, or even of free-to-air television. It understands only commercial television. It understands supporting its friends and its mates in commercial broadcasting and in Sky television.

I believe that in time we may very well see in New Zealand only paid television—within a short period of time—and we may find only one or, perhaps, two television channels, foreign-owned channels owned by people like Rupert Murdoch, and no public service broadcasting. This will have a significant impact on the identity of New Zealand, on who we are, because we will end up watching the equivalent of Fox Television. That is what will be available in New Zealand and that will have an impact on our identity as a nation as well as on the quality of our television.

I was very interested to hear comments from the Minister of Broadcasting, because a number of us actually chipped at him to provide us with the number of households that do not have access to Sky television at this stage. It will be very useful, if he makes a further contribution to this debate, for him to actually provide us with a number. Would the Minister like to contribute the number now, while I am speaking?

💬 Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: You know the answer.

He thinks that I know the answer—the answer that he would give? I know the answer that my colleague gave, and until the Minister provides us with an alternative to it, I do not think we have another number on the table.

I refer to a submission that I quoted from in the second reading on this bill. It is the submission that came to the Commerce Committee from New Zealand directors and editors—the Screen Directors Guild of New Zealand. They also made this point: “We are missing out as a nation if the only values we embrace are short-term commercial values. Many of the intangibles that we value and that make New Zealand special do not have an immediate, short-term benefit but this does not mean they are not worthwhile.” I think those words are definitely the words we should bear in mind when we are considering the ramifications of this legislation.

Progress reported.

Report adopted.

The House adjourned at 9.55 p.m.