Fallout from the Davy distraction

By PAUL NORRIS*

To lose one venture in scandal might be regarded as unfortunate; to have a second climax in a jail sentence looks like carelessness at the very least. The birth of Maori television has been troublesome indeed.

For all its drama, its cascade of revelations, the saga of John Davy has been an extraordinary distraction from the business of getting Maori TV to air.

The focus on Davy has moved public attention away from key issues which merit debate and resolution. The progress of the Maori Television Bill, which establishes the channel and its mission, has been all but ignored.

What is to be the role of Maori television? What is this new channel for? Is it mainly about the preservation of the Maori language, given that the courts have decided that the Maori language is a taonga and that the Government must take active steps to protect it?

Or is it just as much about the nurturing of Maori culture and reaching out to those large numbers of Maori who do not speak te reo?

The numbers are important. If the channel is aimed at encouraging the use of te reo among those who already speak it, it will certainly be minority viewing. According to last year's Census, there are some 130,000 Maori language speakers, about one in four of those who declare themselves as Maori and less than 4 per cent of the total population.

To focus on the needs of this group alone might satisfy the Treaty of Waitangi but could hardly justify the $176 million of public money promised over the next four years.

For this reason the Maori Television Bill says the function of the channel is to reach a broad audience in both Maori and English. But there has been much argument about how the balance between the two languages is to be struck.

The bill's latest draft says prime-time programmes shall be "mainly" in Maori and that at other times a "substantial" proportion of programmes shall be in te reo.

This reflects a defeat for those who had been proposing a firm quota for the Maori language, and a victory for those wanting flexibility as the channel develops.

As a rule of thumb, "mainly" can be taken to mean 50 per cent or more, and for "substantial" read 20 per cent or more.

But the most fervent proponents of the Maori language, sometimes characterised as the language purists, do not give up easily.

It was they who protested at Davy's appointment. Some of them see the use of English as merely temporary; the Maori Language Commission tried unsuccessfully to introduce a clause requiring that English be phased out over the next five years and that by 2007 the channel be entirely in Maori.

The Maori affairs select committee in considering the bill did not support this sunset clause. Perhaps it is significant that the chairman and deputy chairman of this committee, John Tamihere and Willie Jackson, are noted supporters of the need to reach out to urban Maori in English.

Mr Jackson was influential in the decision to move Marae (broadcast on TV One) back to a bilingual format. It was argued that restricting it only to te reo simply had not worked.

So we should expect some use of subtitling and dubbing from one language to another. This is supported both by the Maori Television Service itself and by the Maori Language Commission.

Language is not the only question the channel must wrestle with in trying to reach its audience. There is a complex issue over how the channel should get its signal out to viewers. Should it be by satellite, or UHF, or by leasing or buying TV4, a VHF network?

The channel is understood to favour a combination of TV4 and satellite, but the Davy affair sucked away valuable time and energy needed to resolve these complexities. With decisions on transmission and equipment still pending, there is scant likelihood of Maori TV being on air this year.

Perhaps the biggest issue is the scope of the venture and how it is to be funded. When Maori TV was announced last July, it was hoped the channel could broadcast about two hours of original programming a day at the start. But the chairman of the Maori TV board, Derek Fox, intends that the channel will begin by broadcasting at least eight hours a day, acknowledging this cannot all be original programming.

Mr Fox believes the channel should be close to a full-service channel, with news, current affairs, documentaries, drama and entertainment - a wide range of programmes.

His difficulty is that he does not have enough control of the funding. At the moment, until the bill is passed and the channel has legal status, his board cannot even write cheques. That has to be done by Te Puni Kokiri, which is why it is trying to get the money back from Davy.

Nor does Mr Fox have the money for programmes. This money is to come from the Government through the Maori broadcasting funding agency, Te Mangai Paho.

On this point Mr Fox and his board made a powerful submission to the select committee, arguing the funding should be vested directly in the channel. They expressed concern over the potential for overlap, duplication and disagreement between the channel and the funding body.

The select committee backed away from intervening in this turf war by saying it was a matter to be resolved in a review known as the Maori broadcasting strategy.

Some programming decisions have been made in collaboration between the two bodies. Te Mangai Paho produced a shortlist from producer bids, producers pitched to a joint panel of Maori TV and Te Mangai Paho, and Te Mangai Paho - referred to as "the wallet" by Mr Fox - will sign off on the programmes.

Expect some $9 million of programmes in the Maori language to be announced soon. It is not clear how the English language programmes, which could be up to 80 per cent of the channel outside prime time, are to be funded.

For some months Mr Fox has been saying both publicly and privately that the funding for the channel (the $176 million) is not enough to meet his ambitious plans. No doubt this is true, and he may have been making progress in lobbying ministers.

But in the aftermath of Davy no politician will entertain offering a skerrick more public funding to Maori television, however strong the justification. That is the hard reality of the damage done by a conman with Walter Mitty delusions and a spurious CV.

* Paul Norris, a former senior executive at TVNZ, is head of the broadcasting school at Christchurch Polytechnic.

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