Ben Espiner: Holier Than Thou - Friday 2nd February

What is the future, or fate, of state broadcasters in this country?

It is the first Friday of February, and really the last weekend before we properly get going as a country. When we head into a new year nobody bothers really doing anything in an official capacity until halfway through January, then we have all the anniversary weekends to extend the festival of procrastination, and finally everybody that’s missed out on a moan has one at Waitangi and then we finally crack into it.

And crack into it we shall because Friday brings with it Holier than Thou - the segment here at The Platform where we take a look at what people, groups or organizations have flaunted their apathy towards the public throughout the week in relation to issues we’ve asked them to front on.

If you are a public official, bureaucrat, local or central government representative or spokesperson for a large corporation business or organisation and wish to avoid representation on this list – heed now that eligibility for it is based largely on the importance of issues you have chosen not to front on, how many people are impacted by said issue and therefore your lack of engagement on it and – maybe a little bit - how rude or annoying you were to deal with throughout the process of lodging a media enquiry.

Kicking off the list this week is a Minister under this coalition Government that has repeatedly refused to front on the following issue – and this needs some context:

What is the future, or fate, of public/state broadcasters in this country?

This is, in my view, an underrated and significant topic that receives nowhere near enough attention by government and media alike.

TVNZ and RNZ, the country's two state broadcasters, are sinking. They are imploding fast and survive only by the good grace of the taxpayer who at the instruction of the Government of the day continue to bail them out.

RNZ has no advertisement revenue and, frankly, produces less and less content that New Zealanders find engaging or worth listening to.

It’s not their necessarily fault, the media environment is changing, the content that consumers enjoy and rely on is changing at almost the same rate that the mechanisms through which it is delivered to them is changing. it’s all changing – and the cold hard truth is that TVNZ and RNZ are not positioned at all well to evolve along with them.

Now of course, we’ve always given our tax money to both these companies - that’s how publicly funded media works. But the thing is, that was all well and good when they were as heavily relied on for information as they have hitherto been and, moreover, when they were producing content that the majority viewed as reliable and trustworthy.

But with media companies like TVNZ and RNZ fending off severe financial ailments and dealing with declining public trust, the question surfaces: do we keep funding these entities with our money? Or does something need to change?

Well, that is the question we have wanted to ask the new media and communications Minister, Melissa Lee, for quite some time. On at least three occasions I have asked the Minister on the show to discuss the future of TVNZ and RNZ and her office has declined every single time.

In any case, this issue is not going anywhere and neither entity has any chance of miraculously recovering from their financial situations any time soon, which means they will continue to ask the Government for boatloads of money and Melissa Lee will thus have a decision to make. 

Given the importance of media independence and quality to the functionality of our democracy, I would argue that it is somewhat in the public interest to know at least what that decision might look like.

I understand Ministers are busy, but Minister Lee has turned this topic down one too many times and I’m starting to think something else is at play there. Onto the list she goes.

Moving on to something no less important but perhaps more imminent – Wellington’s Water issues.  I’ve been close to this story and its implications, and the sheer scale of incompetence and bureaucracy around this issue has been absolutely staggering. 

In the week since I last had a rave about this, while 45% of our drinking water continues to bubble up out of the ground, Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has met with local mayors Tory Whanau and Wayne Guppy in an attempt to get to the bottom of who asked for information from who and why that information took longer than forecast to reach his desk.

I’d like to coin a new term here – toxic bureaucracy. Have you ever heard of anything more toxically bureaucratic than a meeting about an email about some information? Astonishing. 

Meanwhile Wellington Water apparently still lacks the funding to get the work done on our infrastructure that we desperately need, and Wellington City Council refuses to pump the breaks on huge funding for cycle lanes placed in increasingly infuriating locations.

Tory Whanau the Mayor of this great city remains as unapologetically uncommunicative as she has ever been and turned down – or simply ignored another invitation onto the show this week from us to discuss the situation with our listeners, many of whom are Wellington ratepayers themselves.

Upper Hutt Mayor Wayne Guppy appeared on the programme this week to discuss these issues, and his meeting with Simeon Brown.

Ben Espiner produces the breakfast show on The Platform. He has a BA in Political Science and English Literature from Victoria University of Wellington. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.