Why, when there is more room on the airways than ever before, has the government decided to limit consumer choice? Because TVNZ now makes money from the exclusive carriage of these channels on Sky's platform. What's anti-democratic, anti-choice and downright unfair about the decision is that most of the programmes on Heartland are archival footage that we, the taxpayer, subsidised long ago. These programmes belong to us, are our heritage and have been cynically sold off at the viewer's expense so Sky and TVNZ can profit. And for what? So TVNZ can dish up a bland diet of ratings led listings.
The sorry state of affairs comes about because in July this year the government passed the Television New Zealand Amendment Bill. As School of English Film Theatre and Media Studies senior lecturer, Peter Thompson, at Victoria University points out, the bill strips our state-owed broadcaster of any obligation "to serve the public interest beyond returning a dividend to the Crown". Money talks and nothing else matters.
As Thompson notes, the government will have us believe that public service television is merely a "nice-to-have" and that in the current financial climate we simply can't afford it. That the current $174 million the government spends annually on public service television - largely through contestable funds provided by New Zealand on Air and Te Mangai Paho - is more than enough to meet the majority of public needs. In the brave new digitally converged world, public service media institutions are anathema. The government policy is to support "broadcasting" not "broadcasters", under market rules.
The problem, as Thompson points out, is that the rules of contestable funding - where programme makers must have a broadcaster willing to broadcast - mean much free to air content is severely limited. Key genres including quality news and current affairs, educational programming and minority interest content - even with NZ on Air funding can never compete with rating driven commercial broadcasting fare. Local content provision in primetime is commercially irrational for broadcasters who can generate much higher margins by running Embarrassing Fat Bodies or MasterChef Australia.
"Ratings may be an index of relative demand," says Thompson. "But they cannot gauge the latent demand for forms of content or services that are never made available, either because of perceived risk or because of the calculated opportunity cost of providing non-popular genres."
Which brings us back to the fundamental question. Why does the government not want to encourage educational programmes for kids, informative news and current affairs and a wider breadth of New Zealand history and culture that is not governed by ratings, advertising and profit?
Apparently because we can't afford it. But as Thompson points out yet again, this is a convenient hypocrisy. There are plenty of mechanisms whereby such content could be funded - the most obvious being a levy on Sky. If it's OK for Sky to pay TVNZ for the exclusive carriage of Heartland and Kidzone, why doesn't it pay for carrying TVNZ 1 and 2?
The canned Digital Broadcasting Review of Regulation would have examined whether Sky should pay its dues as a corporate citizen rather taking a free ride on the taxpayer's back. The means are known as must-carry-must-pay (or must-offer-must-pay) arrangements for pay-TV operators which are common in other jurisdictions. They recognise that subscription platforms benefit from the carriage of free-to-air services and require the operator to pay modest licence fees to the free-to-air channels, even if they are available on other platforms (such as Freeview).
"Had such measures been implemented," says Thompson. "Then quite apart from significantly repositioning the free-to-air sector's relation to Sky (a key reason why Sky opposed the Review of Regulation), a revenue stream sufficient to support the continuation of TVNZ 7 might have been developed."
Norris suggests other funding alternatives for public service broadcasting too. How about making an investment from the millions of dollars trumpeted as the digital dividend? Or making a small levy on the profits of commercial broadcasters above a certain level?
Thompson says the idea of a levy on commercial broadcaster revenue is based on the principle of the "polluter pays" - ensuring that the media operators whose commercial operations contribute to market failures (that educational and informative current affairs are not commercially viable) also contribute to off-setting those tendencies.
Not that there's an embarrassing fat body's chance the government will change course. You get the feeling that the more dumbed down and the more Foxified the media gets here, the more the government likes it. An uninformed public is a compliant public.
But you have to admire this government's ability to pull the wool over so many eyes. Somehow it's convinced the majority of New Zealanders of the following: that partial assets sales of public utilities to corporate interests are good; that exposing our coastline to the risks of deep sea oil drilling is good; that massive mining of our coal and lignite, despite the harm to the environment is good; and that gifting Telecom $900 million of taxpayer's money to maintain its monopoly exploitation of New Zealand telecommunications is good.
Has the government put something stupefying in the water? How else to explain why, when pursuing market solutions to everything, such obvious market failures are not just ignored, they're exacerbated.
Thanks to the era of Rogernomics we have plenty of evidence that privatising public utilities is a doomed folly - that the need for shareholder returns will always trump the public good. Think Railways, Air New Zealand and Telecom.
We also know that the market - the new god that can do no wrong - has no mechanism to deal with environmental damage. There is no economic signal to tell the fossil fuel industry to stop damaging the environment while it obliviously reaps enormous financial rewards.
And the fact that our government had to step in to provide $1.5 billion for a national fibre network because the incumbent monopoly was never going to build one shows yet another market failure by of epic proportions. To then give the same overseas owned listed monopoly $900 million to stuff it up all over again is beyond belief.
And now public service television - a must-have piece of infrastructure in every civilised society - is for the knacker's yard. God defend New Zealand.
