Curran Clare: Television New Zealand Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Curran Clare: Television New Zealand Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:672;Page:18272] 
CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) 
: 
 I will first acknowledge that there has been yet another disaster in New Zealand. Our thoughts are with the people of Auckland tonight who are affected by the tornado. 
The Television New Zealand Amendment Bill represents three things the Government is becoming renowned for: weakness cronyism and dodginess. The weakness of the Minister of Broadcasting is in not having any real plan for public broadcasting in this country other than to get rid of it. If he had a plan then he is being rolled. Jonathan Coleman is a weak Minister. The legislation is a disgrace and his approach to public broadcasting is a disgrace. He is a waste of space. The weakness of the Prime Minister and the Ministers including the Minister of Broadcasting is in kowtowing to pressure by corporate media to bail them out while seeing off the important role of public broadcasting. That is cronyism at its worst. TVNZ will be stripped of its charter and its public interest role. TVNZ 7 has been axed. Our new innovative digital channel is gone while the Government hands over a $43 million loan to its corporate mate MediaWorks which runs TV3 and some influential radio stations. It is an election year—go figure. 
Labour is emphatically opposed to the Television New Zealand Amendment Bill. We are opposed to replacing the TVNZ charter with a statement of functions. We are opposed to the Minister instructing TVNZ that it is no longer a public broadcaster but instead a commercial broadcaster. That was earlier this year—well before this bill is enacted—when the charter was still in force. 
I will tell members what TVNZ said to the Commerce Committee on 7 April in response to a question from me about whether it believes that TVNZ is a commercial broadcaster or a public service broadcaster. The TVNZ Chief Executive Officer Rick Ellis said that the shareholder the Government has made it clear that its primary mandate is to be a commercial broadcaster a commercially successful company. The announcement that the Minister made yesterday in respect of TVNZ 7 I think gives weight to that. He said: “Our primary focus is to be a commercial broadcaster commercially successful”—TVNZ must be a successful commercial entity. Rick Ellis said the Minister had visited the board in March and expressed that view. TVNZ was instructed to prioritise commercial functions and hence neglect the charter well before the charter had even been abolished—and it has not yet been abolished. The charter is supposed to be abolished with the bill but the charter currently remains in statutory force. TVNZ is supposed to be abiding by the charter but the Government has blatantly disregarded the law as it stands because it has already made the decision to axe the charter. This raises some very interesting questions about whether the Government has acted unlawfully in instructing a Crown company through policy to act in a manner that contravenes its statutory functions. Who was the last Prime Minister to do that? It was Muldoon. He made decisions that contravened laws and then changed the law to give his decisions validity. The legal precedent of  
Fitzgerald v Muldoon 
 in the 1970s was a case of the executive assuming the powers of the legislature—powers it did not have. That is dodgy. 
I will tell members what else is dodgy. The Minister Jonathan Coleman claims that the Government did not receive any proposal from TVNZ 7 regarding the possibility of funding TVNZ 6 or TVNZ 7 with commercial revenue from Television One and TV2. However Labour understands that TVNZ did consider this possibility but because of the demand for increased dividends it was not possible. TVNZ told the select committee that it approached the Government with a proposal to keep TVNZ 7 going. Jonathan Coleman has denied that. Who is telling the truth? Perhaps the Minister could answer that question. 
We also understand that the Government instructed TVNZ to operate in effect as a State-owned enterprise and return dividends at a rate of 9 percent even though the risk-free rate was apparently only 6.4 percent. Where in the charter does it state that TVNZ is required to return a dividend of 9 percent and that that requirement takes precedence over all the other clauses in the charter? If there is such a clause then I challenge the Minister to read it to the House. 
To take the cake we also understand that on one of the many occasions when the Minister Jonathan Coleman attended board meetings with MediaWorks not only was the future of TVNZ 7 discussed but a strong message was delivered to him by the board to get rid of it. Given that the Minister subsequently did get rid of it and that MediaWorks was handed a cool $43 million loan to defer payment on its spectrum licences how did MediaWorks get to exert so much pressure on the Government? Perhaps the Minister would like to answer that question. Did the Minister discuss the future of TVNZ 7 with the board of MediaWorks? What was the nature of those discussions and what message was delivered to him? Was it a strong message? Was it a message to get rid of TVNZ 7 or else? He certainly met with the board of MediaWorks on many occasions—nine times to be precise—between 9 December 2008 and the end of last year. I am not sure how many times they have met this year; perhaps he could tell us that. Interestingly he met with the board six times last year. That is a lot. What did he discuss? In the meantime— 
Brendon Burns 
: Every 2 months. 
CLARE CURRAN 
: That is correct. In the meantime when Minister Coleman has been busy meeting with the board of the commercial broadcaster public radio broadcasting in New Zealand is in tatters following a statement made by the new Radio New Zealand chair Richard Griffin that he is going to move our State radio broadcaster towards commercialisation. He said that Radio New Zealand will not become a commercial product but in the next breath he revealed that he was open to sponsorship of some radio programmes at the State broadcaster even if a law change was needed. He said: “This board has got the will and determination to make it happen not just to enhance the product but to enhance the revenue for the product.” Richard Griffin the new chair is a former press secretary to Jim Bolger and he denied that his appointment was political. But his agenda fits with this Government’s view to strip our State broadcasters of public broadcasting functions and to turn them towards cost recovery and even profit. He has been appointed to chair that board after less than a year. 
What does this all tell us and what does this bill being put before the House today tell us? It tells us there is a crisis in public broadcasting in New Zealand. 
Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman 
: I told you. There you go. 
CLARE CURRAN 
: Recently as the Minister has just helpfully told us more than 60 academics in New Zealand wrote an open letter of concern to the Prime Minister the Minister of Broadcasting the Minister for Communications and Information Technology and the Minister of Finance. The letter expressed their deep concern about the closure of TVNZ 7. They said that this was “one more in a series of steps by the government to dismantle the little that is left of public broadcasting in our country. … Public service television is even more important in a country of such limited size. Our small population means that New Zealand’s commercialised television channels simply cannot provide the range of programming that viewers want and should be able to access in the interests of democracy as well as cultural identity. In radio New Zealand has a national public service network Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and publicly-funded Maori radio stations. In television it has two publicly-funded Maori channels (Maori TV and Te Reo) which are performing an important function—but there is no national television service equivalent to RNZ.” 
So while I am at it here are a few more questions for the Minister today. I wonder what his response is to the claims made by those academics that most OECD countries have at least one public service television channel simply because they understand the market will never fulfil this role and without it the potential of television to create a better-informed society and a stronger democracy will never be realised. There is as far as I can discover one other country in the OECD that does not have a public service television channel and that is Mexico. Now New Zealand has joined Mexico and that is shameful. 
Last week Labour called on the nation’s top thinkers—the business leaders politicians academics and senior media industry figures as the Minister has helpfully said—to converge to discuss the future of public broadcasting and media in New Zealand. I repeat that call today and it is my understanding that it is getting a good reception. A lot of people out there care about public broadcasting in New Zealand. That Minister is not one of them. Every democracy should have the ability to tell stories to provide the public with independent critical analysis reporting and investigation and to not be owned by corporate interests.