Kedgley Sue: Television New Zealand Bill — In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Television New Zealand Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:606;Page:3815] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 Part 4 which deals with editorial independence is an extremely important part. We are talking about the fourth estate and television is probably the most powerful medium of communication so there is always the temptation to somehow influence the direction of a television station particularly when one owns it. So this part is crucially important and we are very pleased that it is here. But we do think that it needs some strengthening.  
I note that Katherine Rich has an amendment spelling out for the avoidance of doubt that no direction can be given etc.—and that I think does strengthen the clause somewhat. So we will support that amendment and withdraw our amendment in that particular area. We are worried however that nothing in here prohibits the board of Television New Zealand from interfering in the editorial content of a programme or programmes. This I think should be spelt out. We are also concerned that as Stephen Franks has said although nothing in the bill enables a Minister to give directions the Companies Act will enable him or her to give directions. So I think that perhaps we ought to be covering that as well because it really is crucially important that we do not have a perception of interference in our State-owned broadcasting channel.  
We are concerned of course that there should not be interference with editorial content or direct programmes but I am equally concerned about the fact that now that there is a direct Government grant that may be always at the back of the mind of the people who run Television New Zealand the chief executive and so on. My concern is that it may always be a little bit of a nagging worry for them that if they were to do something that the Government of the day did not like maybe they would not get the same amount of funding the next year.  
That of course is exactly what happened in 1975 when the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon refused to raise the licence fee as a way quite explicitly of punishing the broadcaster for what he thought was expressing independent or dissident views. So it would not be impossible at all for a future Prime Minister who was irritated perhaps by something that happened on television—its election coverage for example—to suggest that the next year the direct Government funding would somehow be reduced.  
The Government does not need to interfere directly in a programme for that sort of implicit threat to have a very specific effect on the board of Television New Zealand. That is one of the reasons that the Green Party would so much prefer instead of direct Government funding—which makes the organisation beholden to the Government and to annual grants—to simply relax the dividend. Why could the Government not say that it does not require a dividend? Why not have the existing arrangement in the bill which said that the transmission arm could make a transparent cross-subsidy to the other section of TVNZ the programming section?  
That in our view is far preferable because it would avoid the fact that every year the board the chair and the chief executive of TVNZ will be worrying about whether the following year they are going to get that $10 million or $11 million grant. That to my mind is the greatest threat to the editorial independence of TVNZ and it is why the financial arrangements that underpin Television New Zealand are so crucial and it is why we are so passionately opposed to this eleventh-hour splitting of the golden goose from Television New Zealand particularly since the Minister has yet to answer our question. The Government has never publicly stated why it is doing this other than to get the transmission arm of Television New Zealand ready for sale—putting it into a separate State-owned enterprise to ready it for sale.  
So I think that this is a very important part. We are very glad it is in the bill; we will be supporting it and we will be supporting various amendments that seek to strengthen these provisions. But ultimately the real editorial independence of Television New Zealand would have been guaranteed if TVNZ was financially independent and had a number of ways of generating its own revenue without having to go cap in hand to the Government every year.