Kedgley Sue: Television New Zealand Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Television New Zealand Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:606;Page:3727] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 As we address the title of this bill I think that Marc Alexander has at least touched on one of the issues that we need to address when we contemplate the title and that is that this bill as it will be amended by the Labour Government supported by United Future will be dramatically different from the bill that went through the Commerce Committee. It is a radically different bill and really that ought to be reflected in a radically different title.  
The submitters who came along and made submissions at the select committee discussed one particular structure for TVNZ and all spoke to that structure. Then at the eleventh hour like a bolt out of the blue suddenly we had the amendments on Supplementary Order Paper 57. United Future has boasted that it managed to persuade Mr Cullen at the very eleventh hour and after the whole bill had been to the select committee to radically change this bill and to break up Television New Zealand. So instead of having an integrated company with a transmission arm and a content-producing arm we have split those two arms up completely.  
The United Future representative has boasted that Television New Zealand is happy with that change and that we should call this the “Saved by United Future”—or something—“Bill”. I have news for him: I have not spoken to a single person in the industry who is happy with this bill. People in the industry are appalled at this last-minute change involving the splitting-off of the transmission arm and the setting-up of a separate arm for the transmission service BCL Ltd which is now to be called Transmission Holdings Ltd—THL—or whatever its name will be. They believe—as does the Green Party—that far from strengthening this bill United Future and Labour in separating off the transmission arm will weaken Television New Zealand reduce its revenue-generating potential and leave it in a much more vulnerable state than it was.  
We believe that will indeed make Television New Zealand increasingly reliant on advertising revenue at a time when we have a charter telling it that we want it to be editorially driven not ratings-driven. But the splitting-off of BCL and all its revenue potential will mean that Television New Zealand will firstly become increasingly reliant on advertising revenue and therefore not able to implement the charter. Secondly it will be increasingly reliant on direct Government funding. That is of course always a recipe for potential political interference in this most crucial area of the fourth estate. I will elaborate on our concerns about the separating-off of BCL and the ways in which we believe that will weaken Television New Zealand when we come to Part 2.  
But we are at present discussing the title and I would like also to say at this point that the Green Party—unlike other speakers in this House—does believe that in this increasingly globalised world where our sovereignty culture and identity are being eroded it is absolutely crucial that we have a strong publicly owned television broadcaster here in New Zealand that is committed to promoting our identity programmes perspective and point of view. What is the point of having a public service broadcaster owned by the public of New Zealand if for example only 13 percent of the programmes on TV2 are New Zealand programmes— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich) 
: Would the member come back to the title please? 
SUE KEDGLEY 
: So coming back to the title of the bill my major point is that it really does need to be changed in order to indicate that this bill has been radically changed from the version that emerged from the select committee. I suspect that Transmission Holdings Ltd will be the only State-owned enterprise to be created by an amendment from the floor of the House. That was an eleventh-hour amendment produced in the Committee stage of this Parliament after the entire membership of the select committee had finished its deliberations and stated that it made sense to keep Television New Zealand with a transmission arm and a content arm so that there could be a transparent cross-subsidy between the two arms.