What is TVNZ for?

The lack of a non-commercial channel means that good local content is forced to the margins. Pic Getty.

Whenever I travel to Australia the difference slaps me in the face.

There's the faster, slightly more accurate driving. The louder, more confident twang of the Aussie beast. That's a given. Put aside also the shimmering beauty of Sydney Harbour and the gritty alleyways and lip-smacking souvlaki of Melbourne, or the actual pubs in actual neighbourhoods with actual public transport. We have much to be jealous of.

Our insecurity can make us overstate our natural beauty or cling to rugby as a form of defence. Or worse. Some of us attempt to warm ourselves on the notion that at least "we" treat our indigenous folk better than they do "theirs".

At best, we can lay claim to more rain and fairly stable politics. They can have the stupid pavlova and phlegm-inducing flat white. If you find yourself clinging to puddings and hot drinks you need to wake up to yourself, and then slap yourself in the face.

However, Australians are in possession of something important that we really lack, something resembling public broadcasting. They have the ABC.

We do, of course, have RNZ for our radio, which is only a few stations short of the full Oz-sized deck. We don't have the youth-focused Triple J, despite Neil Finn and others pushing hard for it decades ago.

You might not be a fan of RNZ, you might call their breakfast show "Moaning Report", or grizzle that you are driven mad by The Panel, made to feel dumb by the brilliance of Kim Hill, or had your mistakes pointed out by Mediawatch. But it's hard to deny that RNZ is a public treasure. It's filled to the brim with Kiwi life and culture. You can hear farming news in glorious detail and the Phoenix Foundation live from the town hall, Sol3 Mio belting out opera, or Guyon Espiner bringing te reo kicking and screaming into the nation's cerebral cortex.

I suspect this was the reason that an expanded RNZ, or RNZ "Plus" as the home of our public TV took hold for a while, despite the elephant in the room with "WHAT IS TVNZ FOR?" scrawled on its side in John Clarke's blood.

Excuse my heavy hand as I drop the late creator of Fred Dagg into this screed, but I noted at the time of his death that while he was sent off in great style by the ABC, a superb TV special among the many tributes, over here we only managed a replay of a Country Calendar episode which bore his trademark genius.

You'd suspect that a more public-focused institution would have done more, cleared the schedule, made a big deal of it.

A push towards a more public style of TV happened a Labour government ago with the launch of TVNZ 6 and 7, change seemed at hand. Some thought the notion half-arsed and underfunded. The National Party smelled socialism, cited low ratings (others disputed this) and flushed the enterprise like a steaming turd.

In the meantime, TVNZ remains the national carrier of our televisual dreams. I watch it a lot. I work on shows that it airs. I'm no hater, but I reckon our failure to embrace a non-commercial outlet means that a shed load of great local content is forced off to the margins of the schedule. Even worse, stuff just doesn't get made in the first place.

Three delivers a news and current affairs serving nearly on par with TVNZ but, likewise, shits out anything local that spooks the ad sales, as we saw with The Spinoff TV recently getting the elbow for Fail Army. When the market decides, clickbait will always trump culture.

You might think I'm just living in a past that has buggered off to the future. In many ways, things are pretty good right now. TVNZ is turning a profit and pushing all sorts of local stuff online, and much of it is brilliant. Comedy is thriving on Three. Maori Television is doing the mahi on its patch. And driving it all, NZ On Air has been getting on with it, making shows all over the place, keeping the culture alive and kicking.

But then I turn on that TV in a Sydney hotel and it hits me again, that feeling that we have an ABC-shaped hole in our national psyche and like a frog that is being slowly boiled we have lost track of the temperature.

Perhaps the Auckland Harbour Bridge offers a way out. Not by leaping off in despair, but by considering the SkyPath, a walkway and cycleway that was taken off the plans in 1959.

We couldn't afford it, they said, no one would use it, others groaned. Nearly 60 years on SkyPath has managed to crawl out of the too-hard basket into the one marked "almost there".

A recent list of 18 Western countries reveals that only the US spends less (per capita) on public broadcasting than we do, Australia spends twice as much, the UK nearly four times, and you don't want to know how far behind Scandinavia we are. But don't feel too bad, their coffee is contemptible, and the pavlova is a disgrace.