TV charter yanked
The Television New Zealand (TVNZ) charter has been finally extracted like a bad tooth that has been afflicting the company for years. This cure will have little, if any impact on what is actually shown on screen.
At least that is what the Minister of Broadcasting, Jonathan Coleman would have you believe.
If he is correct and the content remains the same, the independent production industry can relax knowing the flow of commission work from government owned broadcaster will continue undiminished.
Parliament passed the Television New Zealand Amendment bill a couple of weeks ago, repealing the charter and turning the company into purely commercial entity that would, incidentally, be a much easier sale proposition. The only remaining operational parameter in the act is that it must produce high quality content.
You might be scratching your head to make sense of the Minster’s statements because the point of the Television New Zealand Act 2003 charter was to make a difference to what was shown on screen after a few years of prior operation as commercial state owned enterprise. The charter had provisions similar to what you might expect a pubic service broadcaster to have and sat alongside the commercial objectives of the business. It should have made a difference on screen when it was introduced and dropping it should make a difference.
Commercial pain
If it caused as much commercial pain as Dr Coleman makes out – bad enough to go to the trouble of pass an act of parliament to get rid of it, you could reasonably assume that TVNZ, against its commercial better judgement, was forced schedule programmes that were too expensive to produce and/or didn’t pull in commercially viable ratings.
But TVNZ wasn’t forced to show anything, and New Zealand on Air offers subsidies largely to turn locally
made programmes into a reasonable bet for the broadcaster.
This leaves another possible reason why taking away the charter won’t make any difference: TVNZ chose to ignore the charter part of its founding statute.
Ironically, if this is true, there will indeed be little impact on what is shown on screen and it follows that there should be little impact on the production community and the amount of work that TVNZ commissions – unless it switched to producing programmes in-house.
It could legally do this now because the requirement in the charter to ‘support and promote … the independent New Zealand film and television industry,’ has gone.
However TV One programmer John Wright, responding for TVNZ, says there are no planned changes to the amount of commissioning from the independent community, nor are there plans to expand in-house production capacity.
“Local production is critical to TVNZ success, it is our desire to commission as much local production as we can afford. New Zealanders love seeing themselves on TV. Look at the reception viewers gave Nothing Trivial; it made the strongest debut for a local drama in more than a decade,” he says.
According to Wright changes to programme scheduling and content will be minimal.
“The difference is that there will now be even greater focus on broad appeal content that is commercially viable,” he says.
“That said, however, there are no plans to change existing local production programming in off peak timeslots such as Sunday mornings.”
Another plan
Perhaps there is another agenda driving the charter repeal. Dr Coleman says the reason for the bill is that
Minster of Broadcasting Dr Coleman
it leaves the state broadcaster free to concentrate on being a successful television company without the constraints of an unrealistic dual mandate of charter and commercial objectives.
According to Dr Coleman TVNZ has struggled to return a consistent dividend to the Government although over 90 percent of its funding is already commercial.
He didn’t say this out loud, but removing the charter kicks away a handy excuse which the board of directors and management can trot out to blame poor financial performance of the company.
Another interpretation
There is yet another interpretation: Dr Coleman’s forecast is fudging and given time TVNZ’s content will indeed change under the new regime.
To get a handy, albeit rough, benchmark of what to expect from television channels with nothing but commercial imperatives we need look no further than MediaWorks operators of TV3, C4 and Four.
New Zealand On Air has an $80 million kitty to fund programmes and relieve the channels of much of the commercial pain and risk of showing locally made programmes.
As it happens the pot includes $15 million that used to be given to TVNZ to subsidise their charter obligations. It was given to New Zealand on Air when TVNZ were caught using the funds on blatantly commercial programmes.
Last year TVNZ’s two channels received $35 million more than the three MediaWorks channels.
Apart from drama and comedy, notable differences in charter type of categories were Arts/Culture, Documentary, Children, and Special Interest where TVNZ’s two channels received in total about $18.5 million more than TV3 C4, and Four added together.
Working on the back of an envelope this means if TVNZ cuts back Art/Culture, Children and special interest programming to MediaWorks levels about $18.5 million less New Zealand on Air funding will be required.
40 percent less
Since about $7.5 million of that was made in house by TVNZ anyway, that’s about $11 million gone from those genres for the independent programme makers and about 40 percent less local content in those genres on screen.
If you are an independent working in those charter genres you might prepare yourself for say a 30 percent reduction in work.
Of course, this is rough and ready reckoning and if TVNZ does not want to schedule those genres it is pretty well inconceivable that this New Zealand on Air money would sit around unused.
One way to spent it is to apply bigger subsidies to more expensive types of genres and programmes.
Or as John Wright at TVNZ puts it: “The mix of commissioning will only alter in that there will be a greater focus on ideas that have broad audience appeal.”
Plan
For all that, the real affect will only become clear as TVNZ produces its Statement of Intent, the plan that is signed-off by the government and which it is then judged.
Right now TVNZ can’t say when the revised Statement of Intent will be produced. A spokesperson says the date for this process is determined by government officials, and they are awaiting word from them on when this will be.
In the mean time watch this space – or rather, watch your screen.
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Now NZ filmmakers will have to compete with US & UK productions sold to us far flung colonies in cheap discount packages. Can Kiwis compete with this? Can we maintain our integrity and individuality in the face of the US/UK media juggernaut? I am Canadian and have watched our English language filmmaking, broadcasting, news reporting, literature and music fall prey to the relentless invasion of US culture. The only group who have managed to withstand this domination are the 5-6 million French Canadians who by law maintain their cultural integrity against the market forces of 390 million English speakers who surround them. New Zealanders should take a lesson from Québec before they buy US / UK pre-packaged culture.
You have to ask yourself where the government head is trying to save its way to riches by stripping the culture of its back bone and dumbing down of the populous. To think we have the likes of Peter Jackson, Vincent Ward, Alex Lee, Pietra Brettkelly and Ian Mune with a host of international hits. Hits like This way of life, The Insatiable Moon, Whale-rider, LOTR and others with more being made as I write this. It really shows what a lack of creativity we have in our leads and lack of foresight for our generations to come. The movie that comes to mind with Key leaders is “Dumb & Dumber”.