Speaking in Maori tongues

The last Maori television channel in New Zealand ended in a fiasco. Why should the Government expect a better outlook now? MATHEW DEARNALEY tunes into the debate.

Quinton Hita longs for the day when he gets home from work, puts his feet up, and tunes in to the latest twist of a Maori-language soap opera on television.

It is now no idle hope for the 28-year-old award-winning children's television presenter and youngest member of Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Maori, the Maori Language Commission. For the Government has, 10 years after the Crown promised Maori their own television channel in its undertakings to the High Court, finally provided a launch date for Hita's dream to unfold.

The former presenter and director of TV3's Maori language children's show Pukana, who is taking a break before his next project, acknowledges it will be a daunting task to get the channel to air next June, the start of the Maori New Year.

Huge issues still need to be resolved, including the appropriate mix of Maori and English languages, and how the new channel will be beamed to the largest possible audience when existing ultra-high-frequency (UHF) transmission services are confined to urban centres.

But he has no doubt that the channel will have a profoundly uplifting effect on many of his people, and that their resulting greater self-confidence will produce positive spinoffs for all New Zealanders.

"This is wonderful news. We have been waiting for years, it will be great to come home at the end of the day and watch our own people - our own culture - on television."

Not that the Government's plan to spend $176 million on Maori television over the next four years, most of it on the new channel, is short of critics - among Maori as well as Pakeha.

What do the critics say?

National MP Murray McCully tapped into a deep vein of public concern about alleged separatist development when he charged in Parliament that the amount to be spent delivering three hours of Maori TV a day to a small audience could build 500 houses a year.

Letters to the Herald have questioned spending priorities when Maori children are dying in house fires in Northland shanties or waiting in hospital corridors for urgent treatment.

But Mr McCully's own party was committed to providing a Maori television channel, despite pulling the plug on the abortive Aotearoa Television Network in 1997, and the Government is dding only $44 million of new spending to its predecessor's budget.

As Prime Minister Helen Clark says: "It's the icing on quite a large cake."

For Alliance MP and Mana Motuhake leader Willie Jackson, the lack of decent housing for many of his people is no excuse for failing to fulfil broadcasting commitments that the Privy Council recognised as being consistent with Treaty of Waitangi obligations.

"Do we put a hold on all broadcasting, and stop Television New Zealand until we've built 500 houses a year?" he asks.

"People like McCully can't get their heads around Maori broadcasting being a fundamental part of the Maori deal - if we are not able to debate issues and tell our stories, how can we advance our lives in housing and health?"

What about criticism from within Maoridom, and what does the Government say?

Veteran Maori broadcaster and Maori Party founder Derek Fox says the Government is, in its desperation to curry favour among his people, putting political expediency ahead of producing an integrated and sustainable Maori broadcasting strategy.

He warns that the new channel will be badly underfunded, unable to afford good enough programmes to attract commercially viable audiences, and that insufficient consideration has been given to how it can be beamed to rural Maori.

Fox points to disappointingly small audiences for existing Maori programmes on the mainstream television channels, and the fact that it costs more than $17 million to make 40 half-hour episodes a year of Shortland Street.

National's Maori affairs spokeswoman, Georgina te Heuheu, is concerned the initial presence of three Government-appointed directors on the new channel's proposed seven-member board will compromise its independence. The other four will be appointed by an electoral college drawn from organisations such as the language commission, the Maori Council, the Maori Women's Welfare League, the Iwi Radio Network, and associations of Maori producers and journalists.

The Government is acutely mindful of the Aotearoa Television fiasco, in which the best intentions of many of those involved were eclipsed by a lack of management accountability.

This was immortalised by the notorious $89 underpants included in a $16,000 menswear buying spree that two of its directors, including Tukoroirangi Morgan, before he was elected to Parliament in 1996 as a New Zealand First MP, charged to the channel.

Clark, who intervened to get the new television proposal moving, says the Government will withdraw its directors once it is satisfied the channel is running smoothly.

She also notes that by its third year of operation, 2004-05, the Government will be spending just $1 million less on Maori television programmes than the $50 million budget proposed last year by an advisory committee that Fox convened.

Maori Affairs Minister Parekura Horomia accuses National of failing to deliver its promise to give Maori a television channel, for all his predecessor Tau Henare's talk of wanting to use this as a platform to revitalise the Maori language and culture.

Why does there have to be a Maori television service?

The Government says Maori culture and language are a critical part of New Zealand's unique identity and, therefore, important to all its citizens. It says the new service will give tikanga Maori and the language a strong and independent voice, undiluted by the competing priorities that shackle mainstream commercial broadcasters.

Maori programmes do not even make up 3 per cent of programmes on state-owned television and radio, which the Fox committee said did a disservice to Maori and Pakeha alike in failing to bridge the information gap between the two.

Only by securing a meaningful presence in broadcasting would Maori be assured of a place in the vaunted "knowledge" society, it said.

Besides, in 1991 the Government undertook to the High Court to provide for a separate television channel as an important way of meeting its Treaty obligation to protect and promote Maori language as a treasure, or taonga. This was a condition of gaining court approval to transfer the Government's broadcasting assets to TVNZ as a state-owned corporation.

The Maori Council remained concerned there was no guaranteed access to mainstream broadcasters for a growth of Maori language programmes, which are kept well away from peak-time television. Maori news junkies must rush home early enough to switch on Te Karere at 4.40 pm, for example, or set their alarm clocks for a re-run at 6.10 am the next day.

But Justice McGechan said in his 1991 judgment that buying mainstream television time would be too much for the public purse at a time of recession, and his court lacked the power "to proclaim a brave new world for Maori broadcasting".

"The Treaty ... was not founded on a bottomless treasury," he said.

How much does the Government spend now on Maori television and what are its budget projections?

The Government intends spending $29.9 million this year on Maori television programmes, of which $17.1 million is being allocated through the Maori broadcast funding agency Te Mangai Paho.

These programmes include the daily Maori news programme Te Karere and Sunday morning magazine programmes Marae and Waka Huia on Television One, and the children's programme Pukana and "re-versioned" or overdubbed cartoons on TV3 and TV4.

New Zealand on Air commissions programmes of Maori interest which are in the English language, such as history documentaries and the youth programme Mai Time.

About $7 million of this year's budget will be spent making programmes for a stockpile to be used when the new channel goes to air, while a further $7.3 million will be added in each subsequent year, building to a plateau of just over $49 million by 2004-05.

The Government is also allocating almost $3.9 million this year to the new channel's start-up costs, with further commitments of $6 million to operating and transmission expenses for each of the three following budgets.

Helen Clark says the Government will keep allocating money to Television New Zealand's in-house production units, about $5 million to $6 million a year, for its existing news and magazine programmes.

But all money now flowing to independent producers, including those supplying CanWest's TV3 and TV4 channels, will be diverted through the new Maori television service, which Clark says will have "first call" on the money.

"This doesn't mean TVNZ and TV3 need to reduce what they're showing, but the first right to show will be the Maori television service's, and they'll do the commissioning."

Programmes shown on the new channel could be re-run on the mainstream channels, and vice-versa.

The Prime Minister acknowledges that this leaves the future role of Te Mangai Paho unclear, although she says it may end up being the negotiator between the television service and mainstream broadcasters.

Advertising revenue will supplement public money, while a 10-year Government contract to Maori to manage four UHF frequencies, including its own broadcasting medium, opens up further commercial opportunities.

How much Maori programming will there be, and what format will it take?

Helen Clark says this year's budget is enough to make only an hour and a half of Maori programmes a day.

But each annual addition of $7.3 million will buy a further half hour, meaning daily production of three hours by the third year of the new channel.

The channel will also be able to draw on archival material from Television New Zealand, however, and, after re-running Te Karere and the magazine programmes, could broadcast for five or six hours a day.

It will be up to the television service's board, to be appointed by the end of September, to determine programme content. But a draft schedule the Fox committee produced last year, working to a hypothetical budget of $50.75 million, proposed six hours of television a day encompassing: an hour of news; half an hour of current affairs; 1 1/2 hours of sports; two hours of children's and youth programmes; half an hour of general entertainment and; half an hour of drama.

What will be the language mix?

This is unclear, as the Government has said only that Maori programmes will be broadcast both in Maori and English, to Maori and non-Maori alike.

It has not said how much English should be used, leaving this to the future directors, sparking a furious debate about the station's priorities and target audience.

Willie Jackson believes there should be at least 40 per cent English content to start with, or the channel risks turning off the potential viewers it needs to launch.

He cites a collapse in the audiences for Marae and Waka Huia on Sunday mornings in the last two years, since Te Mangai Paho began requiring them to broadcast fully in Maori as a condition of receiving public money.

Parliament's Maori affairs select committee, of which he is deputy chair, has accused the agency of breaching its statutory function of promoting Maori culture as well as the language.

Jackson, who says he is semi-fluent in the language, claims Te Mangai Paho is effectively denying television access to Maori culture to the majority of Maori who do not speak the language, and to New Zealanders in general.

Te Mangai Paho chief executive Trevor Moeke acknowledges that a survey of about 7000 Maori found 86 per cent wanted mixed language programmes. But he says language is the vehicle of the culture and ensuring wide access to Maori culture is a shared responsibility of various organisations, including TVNZ under its new charter, and not just of his agency.

"People have got to lift their standards," he adds, noting that Pukana beat off English language contenders including What Now? to win the best children's programme title at the 1999 Television Awards.

That may be so, but the programme now captures only 2 per cent of the Sunday morning viewing audience surveyed by ACNielson, while 65 per cent of television watchers are engrossed in the pop music videos broadcast on TV2.

Waka Huia and Marae each draw about 6 per cent on TV One, about half of their audiences of two years ago, although Te Karere manages to hold its own with a 15 per cent share.

Hita has doubts about a ratings agency's ability to assess audiences for such special interest programmes, saying feedback to the various Maori programmes suggests healthy and loyal followings in areas where survey meters may be thin on the ground.

He also says broadcasters have woefully underestimated an "untapped goldmine" of commercial potential in Maori audiences, and cites the overnight success of the bilingual pop group Aaria in the absence of any promotional budget.

Even so, a national survey in 1995 found that the proportion of Maori highly fluent in their native tongue had dwindled to 8.1 per cent compared with 13 per cent in 1973.

Although there has been a considerable resurgence at the youth end through the Kohanga Reo early-childhood movement and Kura Kaupapa Maori immersion schools, there are huge gaps among middle-aged Maori and older guardians of the language are dying out.

This leaves Maori programmers with a serious dilemma of how much English to allow on the new channel to build the critical mass of viewers advertisers need, while also trying to revitalise a degraded linguistic base. However, lessons from other countries suggest the challenge may not be insurmountable.

The Welsh language television channel S4C, which admittedly has a 20-year-head start, attracts more than 10 per cent of Welsh viewers - including many who began watching without understanding the language.

They were initially enticed by programmes such as music and sports broadcasts which they could enjoy without understanding the notoriously difficult Welsh language.