Curran Clare: Television New Zealand Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Curran Clare: Television New Zealand Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:672;Page:18765] 
CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) 
: 
 I return to the core of what the Television New Zealand Amendment Bill is about which is the public good. Before this debate is out I would be very keen for the Minister in the chair the Minister of Broadcasting to respond to the question that has been put to him on a number of occasions as to why if this bill is aimed at providing archived works to the whole of New Zealand the 83000 households that do not receive Sky will not be able to access them. I ask the Minister to actually respond to that question before this debate is out. 
As of 30 June 2010 Sky had a total of 802397 subscribers. At that time the number of households in New Zealand was 1632200. That meant that 83000 of those households did not get Sky which is equivalent to around 2 million New Zealanders. That is very important because it is about equity the public good and who gets to see these important archived works that are the substance of this bill and are the essence of what makes us New Zealanders: our past and how we have developed. 
The claim that it is in the public interest that they be seen again has been made a mockery of since TVNZ Heartland was launched which is now exclusively for Sky to screen heritage programming. As a number of speakers tonight and previously have mentioned those heritage programmes were all made by paid license fees so in fact the public has already paid for the production of those programmes through fees and taxes. Now the public has to pay Sky for the privilege of watching them again and the Sky shareholders get to reap the rewards. 
I know that a number of my colleagues have mentioned some of those programmes and I will mention them again. One of the people in those programmes is very dear to my heart and I have launched a bit of a campaign to attract him to come back home from over the Ditch. It is John Clarke—or Mr John Clarke as he is described on Twitter where we have the occasional conversation—aka Fred Dagg. He is a cultural icon in New Zealand and he has become a cultural icon in Australia. It is a damn shame that he did not stay in New Zealand— 
Hon Lianne Dalziel 
: “If it weren’t for your gumboots”. 
CLARE CURRAN 
: If it were not for our gumboots where would we be? 
Hon Rick Barker 
: Sing it. 
CLARE CURRAN 
: I will not be singing in this House. I pay special tribute to Fred Dagg. A few members on this side of the House would put their hands up if they were asked whether they modelled themselves on him. 
Carol Beaumont 
: Who are the Bruces? 
CLARE CURRAN 
: There are also the Trevs. We have at least one of those on this side of the House although he claims he is not one of those Trevs. 
Then there is Lynn of Tawa David McPhail and Jon Gadsby and Billy T James who brought Maori comedy to the fore in the early 1980s. There was our first enduring situation comedy  
Gliding On 
. Then there were those iconic programmes some of which have been mentioned like  
Pukemanu 
— 
Hon Rick Barker 
:  
Close to Home 
. 
CLARE CURRAN 
: — 
Close to Home Gloss 
 and  
Shortland Street 
. I cannot say I spend a lot of time watching  
Shortland Street 
 as I do not get much time to do that but there are many other award-winning efforts. Where are they now? Where are those sorts of programmes now? Where is the will to make those sorts of programmes in this country? I am interested to hear a bit more from the Minister about that. 
The point is that that was critical television during an important time in our heritage and it should be an important time now. Instead there is very little likelihood of those sorts of programmes being made in this country again. 
Removing the important TVNZ charter is the reason why Labour opposes this bill. It was extraordinary that the Minister of Broadcasting got up in this Committee and talked about the bill making an honest broadcaster out of TVNZ. Somebody said to me today that that is like taking the same moral grounding as a pimp welcoming the legalisation of prostitution. 
If the Minister of Broadcasting is interested in being honest then I ask whether he can show us where in National’s manifesto for 2008 there was any indication that the charter and TVNZ 6 and TVNZ 7 would be scrapped. Could he explain why he continues to refuse to release the documents outlining TVNZ’s proposals for investment in TVNZ 7 and the TVNZ business plans for 2010 and 2011? If he is interested in being honest then what has he got to hide? And why at the 2010 Screen Production and Development Association conference did he indicate that he wanted to retain TVNZ 7? What happened? 
Hon Members 
: Got rolled. 
CLARE CURRAN 
: Well what else are we meant to think? As I said in my second reading speech on this bill there is significant weakness here. 
Can the Minister tell us whether he genuinely agrees with his Cabinet colleagues who oppose the continuation of the funding for TVNZ 7? I ask why he continues to ignore the concerns of the 61 academic researchers who took the unprecedented step of writing an open letter calling for a public debate on public broadcasting issues—a really important debate. Why did he try to mislead the public in the ambiguity of the findings of the officials’ watered-down report on broadcasting competition and why did he and his Government ditch the digital review in 2009? 
I wonder why he does not open up these issues for a proper debate where all of the arguments the evidence the public interest and the public good could be given proper consideration. Surely a Government that is too scared to look at the evidence can hardly claim to be interested in honesty. 
I think the Minister said that the only alternative to scrapping the charter was to fully fund TVNZ at a rate of $300 million a year. That is absolute rubbish and he knows that. Under his watch we have seen TVNZ 6 close down. We know that TVNZ 7 is facing closure. But if one does the calculations one sees it would cost only 1c per person per day to save those channels. I think it has been calculated as costing less than a cup of coffee per person per year. TVNZ Heartland again has appeared exclusively on Sky. 
Some really important quite significant and quite disturbing issues have been raised during this debate. The Minister has suggested that the Opposition missed the announcement on the radio spectrum licence fee deferrals in 2009 but when that decision was announced it came in the context of several smaller broadcasters that were finding times tough in the recession. What was not apparent until very recently was the scale of the MediaWorks deal. If the Government was being open and honest as it claims it has been throughout this debate then why did it not reveal the real reasons behind the deferral decisions? It was only when those recent Official Information Act documents were made available that it became apparent that the Government had bent over backwards to ignore the advice of its own advisers in Treasury and the Ministry of Economic Development.