Tapu Misa: Lots of good reasons to support and nurture Maori TV

COMMENT

I came to this country as an 8-year-old, armed with only a few words of English. Within a few months I was speaking fluent English. It was television that did it, in particular Star Trek, which held me spellbound. In no time at all, I could say "Beam me up, Scottie" in perfect American.

I was always proud of my American accent, which I've since mercifully outgrown. American (and black) was what I wanted to be growing up, because it was so much more glamorous than being an islander, a Polynesian; because people who looked like me were excluded from the Kiwi ideal projected by the popular media.

You simply didn't see brown faces on TV or in advertising, unless it was on programmes such as Crimewatch and the news, and then, of course, it was seldom for anything good.

No longer. If those days are gone, it will be thanks to Maori Television.

On Sunday the new channel began - and what seems most astonishing now is that it took 30 years to get to this point, that until Maori activists started agitating for official recognition of the Maori language and culture, no one in official circles thought it strange, not to say unfair, that a country with a significant population of Maori and with a treaty that guaranteed protection of their language and culture should so wholeheartedly ignore them.

Whatarangi Winiata, who was part of the unsuccessful Maori Council bid nearly 20 years ago to win the third channel warrant for Maori, says it seemed "a just idea for a significant population which we are in terms of this country and its founding document". Under the council's proposal, 70 per cent of programming would have been homegrown, 50 per cent of it in Maori. That compared to the state channels running at that time 20 per cent local content, of which Maori content was so minuscule as to be non-existent.

The bid was scuppered by the last-minute withdrawal of support from what was then the BCNZ, which backed away from its commitment to support the venture financially - beginning many years of state resistance to the idea of a Maori channel.

"It's just a pity," reflects Whatarangi, "that it has taken so much time, incurred so much expense, that there has been so much pain."

It would be nice to think that was all in the past now, but still the detractors continue to mutter about why we need a Maori channel, and why the rest of us should have to pay so dearly for it. For Maori, the answer has always been blindingly obvious.

Despite the billions of public money that have been poured into both state television and radio, and the decades in which they benefited from being protected from competition, they have failed miserably to foster Maori language and culture, to reflect Maori society.

Even today, Maori programming (like Pacific and Asian) is ghetto-ised, deemed not good enough for prime-time airspace.

The perception still holds that mainstream broadcasters can't afford to have too much Maori content for fear of turning off their mainstream audiences. Peter Cavanagh, the new chief executive of Radio New Zealand, told a hui of Maori journalists who asked why Mana News had been moved from an inaccessible 6.42am on National Radio to the even more ridiculous 6.23, that listeners complained there was too much Maori content on RNZ.

Which is exactly the kind of thinking that makes Maori television so necessary.

Such considerations won't factor in Maori television's kaupapa - though they, too, seem keenly aware of the need to win the hearts and minds of all New Zealanders. Not for nothing is their motto "ma ratou, ma matou, ma koutou, ma tatou" (for them, for us, for you, for everyone).

Would it be too much to ask that they be left to get on with it? Apparently. Even before Sunday's powhiri was over, the National Party was casting a shadow over its future.

Gerry Brownlee, the party's Maori affairs spokesman, reminded me of the bad fairy who attends the christening only to lay a curse on the newborn, when he turned up at the launch, having proclaimed his view on the channel's prospects. "I don't see MTS as having a long life," he declared.

His boss has already indicated that he'd be unlikely to support it, despite the Privy Council ruling which Brownlee has dismissed as an example of judicial activism. It's not, he told National Radio, that National "doesn't see the point of Maori television but that it's asking: is this the best way to promote the language?"

He says the $45 million would have been better spent on books and Maori language teachers, which seems breathtakingly unimaginative for a former Maori language teacher.

For my money, Maori TV has already succeeded. It's on air despite decades of official resistance, despite political ill-will and faint hearts, despite a level of scrutiny that would cripple other organisations, and despite the ghost of Aotearoa Television - the ill-fated pilot hobbled not, as the mainstream continues to assert, by an $89 pair of undies but by serious underfunding and its indecent rush to air.

Maori television deserves to be nurtured and supported, not just because it's good - compelling, fresh, lively, professional - but because it's finally taking us into a world little known or experienced by most New Zealanders.

It couldn't have come at a better time.