Let’s deal with their secret decision in two parts – the substance and process. Both are damning.
Their claim that you can read the Broadcasting Act requirement that a broadcasting receiving apparatus is any Internet capable device rather than a television or radio is preposterous. One reason broadcasters have been treated differently is they were granted (paid for) a chuck of the telecommunications spectrum for their exclusive use. When you apply for a chuck of the spectrum, you agree to the conditions of using it for broadcast. This is not the case for people who simply produce video and audio over the Internet.
There can be no doubt the BSA is acting in bad faith in declaring The Platform is a broadcaster, because if they truly believed that they would have not waited until a complaint to make this determination. The Broadcasting Act says all broadcasters must:
Their claim that you can read the Broadcasting Act requirement that a broadcasting receiving apparatus is any Internet capable device rather than a television or radio is preposterous. One reason broadcasters have been treated differently is they were granted (paid for) a chuck of the telecommunications spectrum for their exclusive use. When you apply for a chuck of the spectrum, you agree to the conditions of using it for broadcast. This is not the case for people who simply produce video and audio over the Internet.
There can be no doubt the BSA is acting in bad faith in declaring The Platform is a broadcaster, because if they truly believed that they would have not waited until a complaint to make this determination. The Broadcasting Act says all broadcasters must:
- broadcast at least one notice per day for each day of broadcasting about the BSA procedure
- provide an annual return of revenue by 31 July to the BSA and pay an annual levy
No they did not.
They claim in an RNZ story:
The Authority’s chief executive Stacey Wood told RNZ it decided in 2019 that it also regulated online broadcasts.
“This position has been public and published since 2019.
If this is the case, why did they never ask any online broadcasters to file returns? Why did they never e-mail Bomber Bradbury and demand he informs his podcast viewers of the BSA complaints process, and that he must file an annual return to them?
So the substance of their decision is ridiculous, but their process is what is truly damning.
If they really think the law supports them having jurisdiction over anyone who produces video or audio content over the Internet, they should publish a discussion paper listing the pros and cons. The discussion paper could then become a white paper. Affected parties should be able to submit on it. They should give notice of when their interpretation would take effect, so people know when they have to start filling in annual returns and that they are now subject to the BSA. They would do a major information campaign.
Instead of doing all this, they made a secret in principle decision that The Platform comes under their juridisction. By doing so they would then set a precedent that would be binding on every producer of video and audio content in NZ, and it would have all happened behind closed doors.
There can be no confidence in the Broadcasting Standards Authority for their secret power grab. The board should go, or the whole organisation should go.
David has an earlier article in this regard here > https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2025/10/time_to_abolish_the_bsa_as_it_is_attempting_a_secret_power_grab_over_the_internet.html
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders
5 comments:
Firstly, it is not only Sean Plunket and political commentators who say the BSA are wrong. Retired judge and former University of Auckland media law lecturer, David Harvey says the BSA had "got it absolutely wrong", as well, so this is also from the experts. It's a concern that most of the BSA are lawyers -obviously not very good ones.
But the main concern is how a bunch of Labour's political appointees (which almost all BSA members are) can continue enforcing their woke opinions on NZ as some kind of thought police, as if Jacinda was still ruling this country. The BSA are quite happy for TVNZ and RNZ to regularly give the most biased, one sided "news" every day, promoting their far left narratives, but when Sean Plunket, Mike Hoskings or anyone else questions things like tikanga and "Maori science" they want to come down like a tonne of bricks.
A far left radical agency led by far left nutters intent on destroying anything that resembles democracy. Come after me Stacy wood. Let's see what happens.
There are many ways to waste a regulator’s time. Richard Fanselow has found a new one — filing a Broadcasting Standards Authority complaint built entirely on verbal gymnastics. His grievance? A broadcaster’s off-hand remark about tikanga Māori, which he has stretched, kneaded and redefined until it fits the word “racism.”
The BSA, instead of laughing politely and binning it, has decided to play along. In doing so, it signals how easily bureaucracies drift from oversight to ideology.
Fanselow’s argument reads like a postgraduate exercise in creative linguistics: a dense tangle of reinterpreted meanings and academic mumbo-jumbo designed to turn commentary into sin. His definition of racism is so elastic it could wrap a rugby field — encompassing any remark that might, in some imaginative sense, bruise Māori sensibilities.
This is not scholarship; it’s performance. By collapsing criticism into racism, Fanselow effectively rewrites English. In his world, disagreement equals prejudice, and observation equals offence. It’s the perfect logic for silencing debate — and the BSA, astonishingly, is giving it oxygen.
If he truly believed racial offence had occurred, he was barking up the wrong bureaucratic tree. That’s a matter for the Race Relations Commissioner, not the broadcasting regulator. But Dr Melissa Derby, newly installed in that role, has been notably mute — not a peep over Takuta Ferris’s openly racist comments during the Māori seat by-election, and not a murmur now. When actual racism shows up, the watchdog snoozes; when imagined racism appears, the BSA fetches a stick.
Fanselow’s complaint is therefore less a defence of Māori dignity than a case study in how institutional vanity meets academic overreach. And it exposes something worse: a regulator all too willing to expand its own powers.
BSA chief executive Stacey Wood insists the Authority is “acting within the Act.” Technically yes — the Broadcasting Act 1989, written for television and radio, not YouTube streams or online podcasts. Applying it to digital content isn’t fidelity to law; it’s freelancing. The BSA doesn’t get to redefine “broadcasting” any more than Fanselow gets to redefine “racism.”
Yet Wood presses on, accusing critics of being “hysterical,” which is a curious choice of word from a public servant tip-toeing across a constitutional fault line. It’s not hysteria to ask why a 1989 statute is being bent to suit a 2025 agenda.
And what of Broadcasting Minister Paul Goldsmith, whose job is to set boundaries? He shrugs. “I can’t comment on operational matters,” he says — the bureaucratic equivalent of hiding behind the curtains while the furniture burns. His officials are “keeping him updated,” he assures us. That’s comforting. Nero was well-briefed too.
Fanselow’s complaint should have been dismissed on sight. Instead, it’s being dignified by a regulator chasing relevance and a minister allergic to confrontation. What began as one man’s fanciful prose has become a live experiment in how far state agencies will go to protect feelings over freedoms.
Despite Mr Fanselows box of various qualifications he did spend much of his earlier life as an observer on board fishing boats monitoring the catch brought on board.
Perhaps he was well suited at that task and should perhaps consider returning to it .
Perhaps the fish might better understand the mumbo jumbo he spouts more than us mere humans
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