Franks Stephen: Electoral Matters Bill — In Committee 
Franks Stephen: Electoral Matters Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:622;Page:17265] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 Part 2 does some minor tinkering with the election broadcasting provisions. Many New Zealanders will probably be a little contemptuous of us fiddling with this stuff at all because it is a part of an election process that turns them off. We know that the television stations do not clamour to offer time for political debate even though typically television is a place for debate and contention. The television people tell us that when election broadcasts run their audiences drop away. 
 In this part the Justice and Electoral Committee has fine-tuned some of the processes on the assumption that a scrupulous appearance of fairness is actually consistent with free political speech. What the committee tried to do some time ago and should have been doing with this legislation and did not was look at the whole theory of control of election broadcasting. 
This part regulates something that in most countries is regarded as elementary free speech. Few New Zealanders are aware that political parties in New Zealand cannot even pay for time on radio and television. Even within the spending limits—because many people are afraid of a massive spend-up; they fear that elections can be bought despite the evidence from around the world that that is not very easy—we cannot choose to allocate the funds we are allowed to spend to television and radio. Yet television and radio are clearly where most of the public discourse that sticks in people’s memories takes place. 
So we have an impoverished political debate. By depriving political parties and candidates of the right to speak through radio and television in effect we confer a veto power on journalists. The editor of TVNZ who makes the lead decisions on what the issues of an election are to be has an authority and a weight that virtually no other Western democracy allows. In other countries parties can fight it out. They can choose what the issue is and by their advertising force other parties to respond. New Zealanders have seen the effect of our system over 20 years. It is a system in which the majority of New Zealanders felt that no one in Parliament ever spoke up for them about the treaty. They saw an entire industry created by consensus between the two main parties that could not be challenged because the media consensus was consistent with the consensus of the two main parties. 
So we have in the Broadcasting Act—only tinkered with in this part—a regime for an absolutely derisory amount of time for political debate. The debate is governed and controlled by the people who decide whether there will be a “worm”. It is not genuine debate because the journalists in their news coverage decide what the real issues will be. 
The select committee laboured hard and came up with the recognition that it had done very little. Our most pathetic recommendation is: “We encourage the industry to work with the Electoral Commission to develop a code of practice.” What a cop-out! The ACT member—myself—dissented because that is a deeply constitutional issue. Why should the Electoral Commission be developing a code that could prescribe even further constraints on free political speech at election time? The detailed existing prohibitions should have been abolished in this bill. There has been a very minor relaxation. 
The two major parties of course benefit from the tightly limited time. In fact even Labour and National under the arrangements reflected in the bill hardly get the amount of time to cover the issues facing the country that a supermarket would devote to selling a new dog roll. If we think of an advertising campaign of six or seven short and tightly constrained appearances that has to cover all the issues facing a country at an election we can see how contemptuous this Parliament has been and this legislation is of freedom of political speech and the ability to argue the issues that worry the people.