The suggestion that the Prime Minister was asleep when the decision was made doesn’t wash. There are way too many people around any Prime Minister to avoid ordinary stuff slipping through “by mistake”, let alone something as constitutionally contentious as this. Alarm bells will have been ringing all over the Beehive, and Attorney General David Parker is clear that he was one of those ringing them. His public distancing from the melee is interesting in itself. He’s obviously decided he’s not going down with this particular ship.
So we are left with the Prime Minister’s explanation of what went on — or who is incapable of sacking one of her senior ministers who defied a cabinet decision. Neither option is edifying.
This was also the week that a Minister of Broadcasting whose CV suggested he was entirely unsuited to the job went and proved it. Willie Jackson’s trainwreck interview with Jack Tame on Q+A last Sunday was thick with innuendo that the TVNZ-RNZ merger was designed to deliver a powerful publicly-funded media voice that would agree with the political leanings of its master. It was either incredibly loose or revealing, depending on your politics, and did absolutely nothing to ease the path of this reform.
It’s not just the Minister who does not seem to be able to come up with a good reason for the merger he inherited. The Prime Minister declared, with what obviously seemed like a good argument when she thought of it, that the national broadcaster would go broke without the merger. No it won’t. The Government funds it, and every year it can choose how much more to fund it. Unless the Government is going broke, which would be a somewhat bigger story, then the Prime Minister got it wrong.
We are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars more re-learning the lessons of history with this latest misguided merger. It’s only 40 years ago the monolithic broadcasting structure was broken into separate radio and television operations as the two platforms did not have much in common. They still do not.
The private sector has been down the same path. My old shop MediaWorks threw television and radio together after I left 20 years ago, and after two decades trying to make it work has split them apart again.
The old New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation used to have a mixed-revenue model where the government paid some of its costs, and advertising the balance, much the same as is proposed now. There was no accountability back then and no transparency, with private sector competitors often being disadvantaged by the mighty taxpayer chequebook.
That was eventually stopped, and the New Zealand On Air model created to fund a variety of local programmes on a fairer basis — across whichever media outlet had the audience.
Now we are to go back the old unaccountable days, presumably so we can experience the joy of picking it all apart again in due course.
We are also to be served up programming for audiences “not currently well served” by public broadcasting, including young people. Stand by for the resurrection of the hoary old socialist dream of a non-commercial youth radio network, paid for by taxpayers.
The last time this idea turned up was 20 years ago when a hand-picked group of young people at a Wellington hui told then Labour Broadcasting Minister Marion Hobbs that they didn’t want it, preferring commercial stations like The Edge, George FM, and The Rock. Imagine how much time they’d have for a woke taxpayer funded broadcaster in these days of TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitch.
A broadcasting reform nobody wants, a water reform that is more about co-governance than better water services, a polytechnic reform that does nothing but add another layer of bureaucracy, a health reform which has so far done nothing any different — the list goes on.
You probably missed the Government quietly limbering up this week to merge all the crown research institutes back together again and recreate the old, unresponsive, monolithic Department of Scientific and Industrial Research — last seen sometime in the early 90s. More money, more consultants, and another trip backwards in results.
Some feign surprise that these structural reorganisations even make the news, given restructurings are hardly designed to get the pulse racing. On one level they are right. It takes a special level of political ineptitude to make voters want to cart a government out because of who runs the water pipes.
I suppose if you confiscate assets, force participation, give an unelected minority the greatest say on everything related to water, try to bind subsequent Parliaments to your view, and foist the whole shooting match on people without even taking it to an election then you get what you ask for.
All this adds up to billions of dollars wasted, and for what exactly? There’s always a dividend for those heavyweight rent-seekers in the Labour Party — the Māori caucus and the unions — but nothing about how these reforms will deliver better results for the public. Meanwhile the hospital waiting lists grow.
This orgy of structural reform is creating organisations that serve the people that run them, not the people that consume their services. They come from a time when an organisation was all about the hierachical structure, rather than the end customer.
They are simply a recreation of the bad old days of the public sector.
This very expensive trip down memory lane needs to stop. Thankfully it is looking more and more likely it might.
- Steven Joyce is a former National Minister of Finance. He is director at Joyce Advisory.
