Dialogue: TVNZ's charter a matter of getting back to normal

Leavening the inevitable cost to the taxpayer of
a Television New Zealand charter raises quite a number of politically curly questions, writes PAUL NORRIS*.

There are only two certainties in the wrangling about the Television New Zealand charter - there will be one and there will be a cost attached to all of us.

Some people have questioned the worth of a charter, or cannot see the point of it. The answer is that the Government has a mandate and a mission to reimpose some measure of public broadcasting on to TVNZ, a company that is otherwise supposed to behave as a commercial broadcaster, where ratings and profit are the prime concern.

The charter requires that TVNZ broadcast some programmes that may not be commercial, for cultural or educational purposes - programmes that foster our national identity and culture or which are aimed at children or minority groups.

This is really no more than getting back to normal. After all, what is the point of the state owning a broadcaster if it does not lay down what sort of programmes it wishes that broadcaster to show?

For the past 12 years TVNZ has been the only one of the whole family of state-owned broadcasters worldwide that has had no requirements on the nature of its programmes. It was free to decide for itself. It could have chosen not to show any children's programmes or any Maori programmes, to take two examples of programmes of the less commercial kind.

All TVNZ was required to do was to make the best profit possible. Today's Government rightly says that is not enough.

Of course TVNZ is expected to continue as a commercial broadcaster. There is no suggestion that it should stop showing Coronation Street or Shortland Street or Holmes or Treasure Island and replace these popular programmes with more serious educational programmes about New Zealand's history and heritage.

What is intended is that TVNZ should screen at least some programmes of the types listed in the draft charter, over and above its core commercial programming. The charter does not say how many such programmes or when they should be scheduled. Those are matters for TVNZ.

TVNZ is being asked to pursue several objectives. It must remain commercially focused but at the same time it must show some less commercial programmes to fulfil its charter obligations.

There is nothing extraordinary about this. TVNZ will be in the same position as other public broadcasters with charters which are partly funded by advertising, such as CBC in Canada or RTE in Ireland.

But, of course, there is a cost to operating less commercially than before. The Broadcasting Minister, Marian Hobbs, has been saying that TVNZ is expected to implement the charter without losing audiences and revenue, but this can be seen only as mere exhortation, at best political rhetoric. This circle cannot be squared.

Putting a figure on the cost has not been resolved. A behind-the-scenes ritual dance between TVNZ, the minister and her officials moved unexpectedly into the limelight when National MP Murray McCully claimed that TVNZ had told the minister it could cost as much as $100 million. That is an awful lot of hospital operations or teachers or even schools, as Finance Minister Michael Cullen might well observe to his cabinet colleagues.

Mr McCully might have got the figure of $100 million from a TVNZ document but this was clearly based on the most extreme of a number of scenarios - extreme to the point of being quite unrealistic.

So what might a more realistic figure be? There are two elements to the cost of the charter. The first is that TVNZ will have to make or buy some additional New Zealand programming, which will be considerably more expensive than the imported programming it will replace. Documentaries made in New Zealand are some 10 times more expensive than those bought from the BBC, for example.

The second cost is that some of these charter programmes will simply not draw as many viewers as more commercial programmes. It is hardly surprising that the New Zealand documentary-drama Feathers of Peace did not rate as well as Coronation Street. We know that mass audiences prefer to be entertained rather than enlightened. New Zealand programme-makers need to get better at doing both. It can be done, as the BBC's The Human Body showed.

Lower ratings for some programmes will mean lower revenue from advertisers. But it is all a matter of degree. If the charter is introduced in a moderate way, with not many new programmes and mostly in off-peak slots, the additional cost to TVNZ could be as little as $10 to $20 million a year. If it were deep implementation, with a rich variety of history and heritage programmes in primetime slots, the cost would be correspondingly higher, say $30 to $40 million a year.

The political rub is that the dividend TVNZ paid to the Government last year was $30 million. So the cost of the charter could well mean no dividend. This is effectively a cost to the taxpayer.

One possible source of public money to pay for the charter has so far received little attention. There are some in TVNZ who will argue that if all the public broadcasting obligations are to be laid on TVNZ, all the public money available for television should go to TVNZ - the $46 million of funding for television programmes allocated by New Zealand on Air.

This money is contestable between broadcasters so it is available also to TV3. That TV3 will inevitably benefit from TVNZ becoming less commercial adds grist to the argument that TVNZ should now get all the NZ on Air money. And there is always the point that TV3 is Canadian-owned and fully commercial, so why should it get any public money at all?

There are good reasons why the public money should be spread among the broadcasters. It ensures that TV3's audience are exposed to more New Zealand programming than they would otherwise get. But how much public money should be spent on broadcasting and where any more public money should come from are politically curly questions. Expect the ritual dance to continue and the heat to come on Ms Hobbs as she tries to get resolution on the terms of the charter and its cost.

Meanwhile, savour the richness of those who have been declaiming for years that TVNZ's programmes are nothing but populist rubbish, but who now turn round and say the charter threatens TVNZ's commercial success. You cannot have it both ways. There will be a cost to the charter. Are we prepared to pay it?

* Paul Norris is the head of the broadcasting school at Christchurch Polytechnic.

TVNZ draft charter