Maharey Steve: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
Maharey Steve: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Volume:631;Page:3049] 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister of Broadcasting) 
: 
 I will take a short call on Television New Zealand. The financial review for the year is— 
Hon Bill English 
: Another mess. 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: The member Bill English should go and get therapy. He has been such an angry young man for such a long time. He ought to seek help and that is all I am saying. I want to tell listeners at home that we are just trying to get through the insistent yelling of Mr Bill English who needs a bit of counselling. 
Television New Zealand operates in a world where things have changed quite substantially for all public broadcasters all around the world. The issues canvassed by Mr McCully I will leave for the select committee to canvass because they are issues that lie within the purview of the committee and are nothing to do with the financial review. I want to put on the record of the House that the television business is a very difficult business to be in. Not only is it one of high competition with a fragmenting audience but a lot of people out there are seeking to get others involved in radio television newspapers and magazines so the media market is highly competitive. Many people like to compare Television New Zealand’s performance now with its performance in the past but the past is something very different. There were fewer outlets competition was less and people automatically watched Television New Zealand—that is what they did. 
I want to put on the record my thanks to the company for getting through what has been a difficult period where there has been a number of issues around presenters and so on. It has managed to maintain a very good financial performance during that period of time. In fact in comparing Television New Zealand with other public broadcasters around the world one can see that of all public broadcasters the company is holding its audience share which routinely peaks at around 65 percent. It holds the major news share and therefore is still returning a major commercial return to New Zealand and in that sense is more successful than ABC NHK CBC and BBC. Those organisations do not have that kind of audience share and therefore cannot command that kind of share in the market and cannot get that kind of advertising revenue. 
That is an amazing performance when one thinks about the kind of competition that is being undertaken here. New Zealand has the most competitive media market anywhere in the world at this time because of our heavy deregulation in the 1980s. It is the nature of the game. So from a financial point of view we are looking at a year where things have been good for Television New Zealand and it got its share of the market as we had hoped that it would. 
On the other side of the equation we know that the company has also had the operations of the charter to consider. The charter is a new area of work. It takes a while for programmes to be commissioned to be put on the air and then to find out whether they are working. But if we look back over the last little while with the small amount of money that the company has had we have begun to see a change in its behaviour. Whether it be more Pacific Island news being put on during an evening or whether it happens to be a new programme like the  
Frontier of Dreams 
 we are seeing an effort made by Television New Zealand to begin to do things that otherwise it would not do in a commercial environment. It is beginning to change its behaviour. It has a better relationship with the private broadcasters that make many of its programmes. It is attempting to move down that road and I am hoping that what we will see in the immediate future is more of that kind of behaviour. 
This country owns television and radio because they are part of the national infrastructure of any country. Whether it be science schools or whatever we want to have infrastructure that is our own because we want to be able to control those things that matter to this country. That is why we own Television New Zealand and when we look back over the past year we see that this company is seeking to carry out its mandate as a public broadcaster within the constraints that it has on it—for example not getting a great deal of money from the taxpayer. It is expected to generate income from its commercial revenue and it is managing to do that as well. 
As Minister of Broadcasting I want to put on the record my thanks to Television New Zealand for its performance in those areas. As I have said elsewhere on the record I will be pleased to see it out of the news for some of the things that have put it in the news over the last little while and carrying on with an underlying strong performance through this year. 
Report noted.