Steve Maharey: Hugh Rennie, who we are going to ask not so much to summarise because there is a record of the day's events literally for you to get hold of, but Hugh will work his way through what he feels have been some points that have been made today which bear observing again and some points that he thinks may not have been made today which are worth just thinking about in terms of the discussions that we have had and then we are going to ask each of our international guests to stay seated and relaxed and just make a few comments and observations that they'd like to leave us with, to mull over as we think our way forward from today's events and as I said we'll get into some short questions. Hugh Rennie.
Hugh Rennie: Yes thank you Minister and good afternoon. It's almost exactly fifteen years ago I stood on a similar podium and greeted the arrival as separate entities of Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand, bade them well and went back to legal practice. Listening to the discussion today I've been struck in many ways by the common features of the discussions that we had in the 80s and the common features that we have today.
I acknowledge our overseas guests who have joined us to bring a northern hemisphere perspective to us. I reflected as I sat here today on just who we would pick from today's speakers that we could send back to help them out in Europe on how to run a broadcasting system. I was going to nominate Hone Harawira but I wasn't sure I'd get his name right. I certainly think that if Tom Conroy could be dragged away from Southland he could show the BBC how to stretch the dollar a little bit further. Indeed I suspect his budget is about the same as Greg Dyke's morning tea money. But I have a feeling that for Tom it has probably been a bit of a miracle for him to get here today and also keep the whole of Southland television ticking over.
It was Ian Taylor who wanted to take the word “public” out of the title and put in “bloody good television”, and that was something that I was itching to do except I wanted to take the word “public” out altogether, and I wanted to have two titles, one for radio and one for television.
Jane Wrightson I think repaired it partly for Ian by coming back with the title “bloody good television and radio”. But really you know, as the day wore on, what I've seen before happened. The television subject overwhelmed the radio people. Radio to me is just as important as television. It's however different. It delivers different things. It can stand side by side but it's an equal partner. I think there is a real need when you talk about broadcasting and broadcasting policy and broadcasting operations to get those two out and look at them quite separately and distinctly.
I was looking at the Niu FM results that were mentioned earlier and found that one of their figures in their survey showed listeners listening 16 hours a week to radio on their station, which goes to show how they can reach their community. We may yet be about to see a time when radio listening is longer in duration than watching of certain types of broadcast television I suggest.
So trying to split the topic into two - not very easily because of the way the conference is run and not attempting to summarise everything that you've heard in the course of today - I first want you to think about the purpose and outcome of this conference. Why did you come? I came because I was told to, you probably because you wanted to. Now that's why we're here but what is the purpose and what is the outcome? Is it to achieve a consensus so the policymakers can actually listen to what is to be said? Is this actually going to come together to a view which has meaning and goes somewhere or have we all got together in a room once again to put our arms around one another and remind ourselves that broadcasting is great, public broadcasting is even better, commercialism is awful and somehow out there, there are a lot of people who don't seem to recognise that?
In 1988 the Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand in one of its last acts did something that was either very intelligent or very stupid. It actually gave up its entitlement to receive a licence fee in favour of it going to New Zealand on Air. Why did we do that extraordinary thing? Well we did it because at the time we had a vision that by putting the licence fee in the hands of, effectively, the people who paid it, putting it in the hands of the audience, that we would become accountable to the audience. We thought that it would provide a means by which as we transited from a couple of television channels to rather more, it would provide a security, a bridge, a means of keeping in place what had been achieved. We also thought it would be a way in which one would seed new opportunities and new media. We thought that it would provide a programme pool which could be drawn on by stations such as regional stations devoted to iwi and special interest and so forth. We thought that the public services that would be achieved would set the standards that everybody else had to come up to. And on that basis we could see New Zealand broadcasting we felt going forward in a fashion that was inclusive of everybody and made it part of our lives.
I don't think it's altogether worked out that way 15 years later. Some of why it hasn't worked that way I don't understand, and having listened to the discussion today I still don't understand. We certainly never envisaged that hours and hours and hours of programming would be locked up inaccessible to anybody whether by rebroadcast or on tape or on DVD or whatever the case might be. We certainly didn't envisage that previous governments, not including the Minister's government, would impose a financial structure on the publicly owned television channels such that in effect the broadcasting licence fee went to TVNZ so TVNZ could use it to make programmes so that TVNZ then made surplus profits so it paid a large dividend and in effect the licence fee went to the government by an indirect means.
I think that that history has destroyed the credibility of the licence fee in this country, at least amongst this public, at least for some time. That I suggest is something of a tragedy because we've moved away from broadcasting being accountable to the audience and instead broadcasting is accountable to the politicians. Some of them are nice and are friendly and are strong and supportive and some of them, whether they look like Ian Taylor's penguin or not, actually want to sell the whole show off for the largest sum. That is not a secure and it is not a safe situation for you I suggest.
The ‘88 changes, which in large measure, defined some of the features of the broadcasting system we've been talking about today, weren't great in my view. They were the best that was achievable in an unfavourable climate and I think some things have since been lost. We thought New Zealand Broadcasting had a vision of its regions: our audience doesn't stop at the shores of New Zealand so why should New Zealand broadcasting activities stop at those shores? But of course there was a retreat out of some small initiatives there. We thought that our public broadcasting (if you want to use that title) had a place in satellite transmission and so forth. It began there, of course it was forced out.
One of the challenges I thought might be debated today but hasn't been, and is still alive, is how is that when broadcasting of the kind that has been described today has such widespread support amongst the public, how is that nonetheless bit by bit it has been somewhat forced back from its proper role? We've had some overseas comparisons. We can learn from those. I'd be very disappointed if we copied them.
I was interested to hear Greg Dyke talking of what the BBC does with £2.7 billion. It's important to remember of course that in broadcasting economics your cost of operating doesn't rise as your audience size goes up. The BBC covers much the same geographical area of New Zealand but in the days when there was a licence fee, for every licence fee that we got in New Zealand, the BBC got about 15. Okay there were some extra costs, programme costs, rights, things of that nature but on a very rough comparison worked out last night with only a couple of wines inside me I think that the relative economic cost of the BBC as applied to New Zealand would be an annual licence fee per household of about $5,000. If we had that kind of revenue put into broadcasting in New Zealand who knows what we could do?
We do more, we do it with less, and I honestly believe, I believed it in ‘88 and I believe it today, that we do it generally better.
It's good to hear that the BBC does what it does and sees what it sees. And it's impressive as to what it does with the resources that it has. But the question I would like to see answered about the BBC is if you have the resources that the BBC had what could you do with those resources? Whereas the question and the answer we usually get is this is what the BBC does with the resources it has. That is not the same challenge.
Minister, I am sorry to pull your leg, but you in relation to this you spoke of our search for national identity. When I went through university we were trying to find the great New Zealand novel. We read a hell of a lot of them but we never actually found one and we ultimately gave that up. I think searching for our national identity is similarly fruitless. Our identity comes from understanding what we are, not from trying to be something different, and broadcasting for me explores and enlightens us about what we are and enlightens us about where we may go and what we may become.
We have one person who bravely joined us under the title of commercial broadcaster. My good friend Brent Impey from the days that we snarled at each other across the third channel hearings was here from a commercial background. I was really interested to see what happened in the discussion on commercial broadcasting today. What is it? One speaker called it venal. Well what really struck me was that when you have Maori television up here, Niu FM, the iwi stations, Southland TV, did you hear them talk about whether they were commercial or non commercial? Well I was listening and they didn't. They simply talked about being in contact with their audience. And the reality, in my strong view, is that there are components in any broadcasting system, some of which might be called "public" and some of which might be called "commercial". And how you adjust the balance of that depends somewhat on what you're doing. The one speaker from those areas I've mentioned who referred to “commercial” was from Maori FM - great. It's right at home. Part of the system. Part of the community.
I suggest we're still highly immature in our response to this issue of commerciality and I'm really cheered that all those speakers for me showed a mature confidence that they're at home with it. They know what it is, they know how to cope with it, they know how to take account of it in their broadcasting and in their communities. I listened for example to Hone Harawira's account of how there was an extra need, an extra dimension and one went out into the community and put it together and made it work.
I started to make one of those lists: public broadcasting might be publicly owned and publicly funded, community owned and publicly funded, privately owned and publicly funded, publicly owned and funded from commercial revenue, privately owned and funded from commercial revenue, privately owned and funded from the audience by pay TV… and that's not a complete list.
We need to move on from this “us and them” definition I suggest, and we need to remember only one thing, and that is that the commercial operators have to earn their presence amongst us by meeting people's needs, not I suggest by exploiting people's weaknesses. The commercial broadcasters have said “leave it to the market and it will provide”. The proof of our experience in this country, in this economy is that that often does not work.
But before we sit here and proudly pat ourselves on the back and talk about public ownership being great and everything else being venal, Greg Dyke talked about the broadcaster's ability to take a risk. Absolutely right, but when is it done? I think one of the greatest problems in public sector broadcasting is that people feel secure. And security breeds complacency, indulgence, and capture by self interest. I remember from my days with Television New Zealand just a couple of examples of that discovery. It occurred to us one day to do a survey to find out what our various producers had made and we found one who in five years with us had never brought a programme to air. Always been very busy, busy desk, lots of projects, bids for the next year, just a little difficulty with what was going on at the moment. And we found another example of a current affairs programme which we had bought in, which outraged our staff. In fact led to questions in parliament. The question was, why hadn't we made it ourselves, and on interviewing the producers we were told “we didn't want to do it, the topic was boring”. If the topic was so boring that the incumbents were incapable of producing an interesting programme and yet someone working outside could do that, I think one is entitled to say that is a weakness of the public ownership structure.
And to that you add complex mechanisms of control. I'm sorry Minister, but politicians have never been good at letting go. And never will if there's broadcasting involved - in the end it is in many respects an exercise of power. So at the broadcast level what we need is empowerment through access. Broadcasting is simply part of the fabric of our lives, not extraneous to it. It is an integral part of our lives. That's actually why I'm slightly depressed by the TVNZ Charter. There's nothing wrong with it at all except it's so obvious, it's disappointing that it ever had to be said.
Moving on quickly to standards. Brent Impey had a go at that. I think he thought he's tossed a grenade. I told him afterwards I largely agreed with him except on one thing which was on Corngate. I can't comment on that until the High Court rules in February, except to say two things. I'll be there in February. And I do think that when there are known rules all involved should be able to play by them.
Now having said that- Brent knew I was going to say something and he went away so we'll live with that - let's come back to the more key point. We have a Standards system which dates right back to the day when we had one channel. Some of it is highly relevant but is it all? We talk about balance. But if you look at the concepts of balance, we talk about balance for example over a period of time in a particular broadcaster's coverage of a matter as if we all watched only ever one broadcaster. Balance in fact has become an exclusionary phrase, I suggest, which has meant that some of the programmes that we had spoken about didn't make it or haven't made it, haven't ever been made because of the difficulties of getting them to air. I think that Brent, with respect, I think has missed the point about whether it's self regulatory or whether it runs off the statute. The issue is about whether the values are current or whether they aren't and on that I suggest he is right to say that they are values that should be set by the community in association with the broadcasters.
Maori TV, what can I say? It's about time! It's not, it's thirty years late. I am absolutely confident that at these conferences there will be people from Maori TV with a grin on their faces telling you all how they did this and that, that you thought they were never going to do.
Access Radio: I expected to be told that their largest problem was that their broadcasters were always being stolen by other people, their best programmes were always pillaged by other radio stations and their best ideas stolen by news. I didn't hear them say that, why? There is a situation with a community interface with broadcasting and yet it doesn't seem to be an area that feeds through. Maybe on occasion, but I would have thought their description would immediately have been this: “Our largest problem is all our best pieces are stolen”.
I felt we were never going to hear about technology but we did at the end. And then we heard a number of comments which I'm not going to repeat. If there's one thing I've learned in all my years of association with the media it is that in the end, and despite Marshall McLuhan, what is significant is the message rather than the medium.
Finally, isn't it all about having fun? Think back over those who got up here and bounced and grinned and chuckled about what they were doing. One or two didn't. I'm sad for that. But broadcasting has to be an expression of things that are interesting. Things that interest us. Things that we buzz about and that we pass on to others, and I think the theme that came through, particularly from the speakers on the panels was, hey, it's great and we can do a whole lot more and let's talk about how we can do it.
So we come lastly to try to draw some conclusions.I think out of today with confidence we can say that what everyone has said is an affirmation that broadcasting is, to steal a phrase, by the people for the people. It's integral to our lives, it's something that has to exist alongside business and politicians. And we need to adjust to the maturity of that and make sure that in broadcasting we're in control of that. It has to exist on the public's terms and be accountable to its public. The case for broadcasting which is driven by people in their interests and not out of commercial or political objectives is unarguable. And yet we keep recycling it internally amongst ourselves and then we're pained that it isn't accepted outside…
… and we call ourselves communicators!
Thank you very much.
Steve Maharey: Okay, now on the theme of concluding we've invited our three international guests to reflect a bit on the conference, as I said, thoughts they might like to leave us with. At the end of that Hugh you may like to make a short comment in lieu of a question or pose a question just to round off the day. I thought we'd begin as you're closest to me, Bob with Bob Collins just making his observations on the day.
Bob Collins: Thank you Minister. I think the first thought that strikes is should we be the people - well let me speak for myself - should I be one of the people who makes concluding observations because this is your community and these would be your decisions and the last thing you need is people from outside telling you how things would be in the same way that the last thing we need is people from outside telling us how things should be in Ireland, particularly Canadian or British broadcasting conglomerates. I think that every community should be in continuous conversation with itself about the nature of its broadcasting, about the nature of its media, about how changes in society impact upon what it expects from the media and how the new developments can be integrated into the lives of the community. And one of the things that struck me most today was the texture and the vigour, the variety, the commitment, the enthusiasm, the quality of the individuals and of the thinking and the revelation of the variety of layers in the rich structure of the New Zealand broadcaster.
It's very difficult to make anything resembling a recommendation, not that one should in those circumstances. I think that for small communities - let me put it this way - back in the halcyon and good days of the feminist movement in the 1970s there was in the kitchen in my house a poster, a cartoon which says a man needs a woman like a fish needs a bicycle and - a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, thank you. You didn't see the one that was in my kitchen. And small communities consisting of four million people need to be compared with communities of 57 million people with, I prefer to say, four billion euro than 2.7 billion pounds, it sounds better. Like the aforementioned fish which needs the aforementioned bicycle. One of the curses of our TV is that are constantly compared with the BBC and then they brought along Channel Four so that we could be compared with Channel Four as well, both of whom have vastly more money than we could ever afford to have, and I think that as I said communities have to identify their own way forward. The salvation is in your hands and certainly not in ours. Reading a map is no substitute for taking the journey and that affects people coming into this country who are to a certain extent glancing at the map and can't thereby believe that they have taken the journey to this community. But writing the map or drawing the map is no substitute either, and simply writing a charter it doesn't necessarily mean that the task is undertaken.
I think that there are serious issues when public money is made available for any purpose. I don't share Hugh Rennie's view that public service necessarily means security. You should come to visit Ireland and I can show you how security is spelt. And I'm not sure the teachers and nurses are complacent simply because they're paid out of the public purse. I believe as I said this morning that it's proper that communities, that states, that governments should invest in the broadcasting environment for their citizens. How that is done is your decision. I share Michael Jackson's view that I wouldn't do it the way that you do it. And however we talk about public broadcasters or not-for-profit broadcasters, the one thing I do believe and I'm sorry if I offend anybody's sensibilities by saying so, is that the one thing not to do with public money is to give it to privately owned large profit-making organisations. That in my judgement is not what taxpayers' money is for and no amount of subtle or clever argumentation will avoid the conclusion that taxpayers' money is substituting for what private money would have been spent.
One of the invigorating experiences of the last three or four days in this country has been the variety of the cultural realities which, of which it is composed, and in a very particular sense of the vigour and richness of the Maori tradition and of the current Maori culture. And Maori television in the same way as Irish language television or Welsh language television, needs to be free to be different. It isn't simply replicating the pre-existing provision in a different language. It's an expression of a different culture, and in that sense I think was the point that was being made this morning, it's not being mainstream. It is absolutely mainstream in the life of the community but it has to be free to be different and should not be subject to retrospective criticism for having been different. I think that the broadcasting environment will be significantly enriched by the presence of a Maori television service and I hope that people will turn it on more than once because I think that everybody will receive a more comprehensive sense of what it is to be a citizen of this country by experiencing that which it will offer.
I don't have any other thoughts or considerations to offer. All I can do is make some - is offer some reflections, is give some thoughts based on our own experiences, is be even more struck than I was before about the resonances that we have in common and about the relatability of our experiences as two countries and two peoples. I think it's impressive that this has taken place and another reason why not to make recommendations or concluding remarks, this is not the end of the process. It's the beginning. And quickly you will reach your view as to what the destination should be, and I think it's encouraging that not only has the government taken a view about the public character of broadcasting, that it has taken this initiative and that the Minister has been here throughout the day and that represents a degree of willingness to have an open mind. That, to put it mildly, is not usual. I want simply as the final word to say thank you for the experience. I found it both enjoyable and very enriching, thank you.
Steve Maharey: At the end of the table now I invite Tim Gardam who I should mention also is participating in this conference courtesy of the SPADA conference, which at least some of you will be at perhaps over the weekend. Tim, your thoughts?
Tim Gardam: I've been to a lot of conferences over the years and most of them have produced some excruciating experiences and something I've tried to escape out of from the first couple. But I've been wondering as I've been here yesterday and today, what is really extremely interesting and it has. And I would reflect what others have said. But you don't need to look at Britain or anywhere else really to try and copy and nothing I can say is going to say is going to suggest that you do that because I think you're in a fundamentally different place. It is a very interesting place to be in, because the term was set this morning when the Minister said that New Zealand is a young country, it's changing, it's going to change fundamentally in the decades ahead and that will relate the demographics of the population is undergoing a revolution.
And in that sense, because you are in a position where you are wishing, you don't see public service as some heritage that you've got to hang on to, there's something you want to actually re-inject, because you feel something went wrong. It gives it a sort of virility, it gives it a toughness of purpose which I think is very healthy to talk in these terms because so often in Britain you get this rather elegiac, defensive, pompous sort of sense that the public service is something which is under attack and anything that's modern or new is a threat somehow to those old conservative values, and what I think is interesting about the discussions here has been about the sense of public television is that it's about now.
And one of the great dangers that I think you're are going to get round, which I think is a danger in Britain people fall into, is to set the old fashioned and serious against the modern and tabloid and sense that there is something modern and forward looking and smart and curious is at the centre of good television which is projected with a public purpose. It's so much more exciting [than?] in the sense of heritage television, sort of pastoral version of a good that has to be preserved. And I think that gives a freshness to everything you're about.
One thing that has been touched on a lot today which hasn't been interrogated much is the audience's perspective of what we've been talking about. And I think one of the things which keeps on cropping up is the fact that the phrase public service television is pretty unappetising. People sit down to watch, when people are sitting down watching a programme or to watch a channel they want to watch whatever they want to watch. They're not thinking, “I'm doing this for my public good”. The fact that there is, there are communal benefit that come out of lots of people watching programmes over time which makes them what they are is the end game. But I think one of the things we've always been very bad at in the past is asking the audience what are those things which they value about television and that in which they would express and articulate in their own words and taking that idiom, taking that language and feeding that back and saying, right, this is what we mean by these public values.
And it's quite interesting - the only experience I would share with you when we've done that with Channel Four in Britain is saying what's Channel Four for, do people really get what we think we're about. Because actually the audience who watch invariably are much more clued up and sharp and clear about our own self delusion. We think we're too clever by half, and there are things where we get it right and things where we get it wrong. And so phrases like you know well they like Channel Four they say you know because “it makes you think” or “your shows are more real than the others” or another phrase I always remember: "what you're really saying with your shows the BBC is don't even think of going there because you wont like it when you get there because we are in a different [??]"
And that sort of freshness of idiom from the viewer galvanises the producer, galvanises the broadcaster, so that's what we're about. Not about that because that's what they all do, take away from what we're doing, and I think if you're going to pursue this debate and you're going to bring this debate out from confines of the sort of media elite into your society. To find the means of capturing those phrases, capturing the articulacy of the viewers, is absolutely vital.
The other key thing - I don't want to get into the details which I've covered completely about how TVNZ is funded, there seems to be all sorts of pots of money floating about. But it does seem to me the one principle that came out clear from the past day and a half is that if something is not for profit, it is doing something fundamentally different to something that is for profit. The motives are different. You'll get a lot of overlap with the sorts of shows you're making but in the end the purposes of a not-for-profit organisation are different perhaps with a shareholder driven organisation. And in a really well-calibrated broadcasting environment one rule: that creative tension will produce good things on both sides.
And in that sense, of the need for competition beyond the competition for the bottom line I think is vital to making public service programmes which people want to watch. I was interested to hear that TV3 had made a show called Open Door, and that show has actually broken even because of the money that New Zealand On Air had put into it, and that sounds to me interesting. The sort of thing, that sort of mechanism is unique to New Zealand. It's something I know people in Britain will look at but it is, it does seem to be one mechanism whereby you can incentivise the market to do more than the market otherwise would do. It seems to me that is a key to modern public service television in a fragmented world - is not to say you give dollops of money to the public organisations, the public things, you know, “the market, they're going to do market things”. It's incentivising the market all the time to see what the market will do to extend choice and to encourage the market to be more brave.
I think a great phrase from Bob Collins earlier today which I've never heard before which is if you're going to be a public service broadcaster you must want to be one, and it's as simple as that. But I'd just take that away if I were you. That's the test of any public service role, so do you really want to be that? And it is perfect to those people having worked in public service that both commercial and licence fee driven organisations, there are oftentimes the heat and dust, the day-to-day ratings battle when you can sell your own ambition short, and the interesting thing I find is when you do sell yourself short and you commission a show because you think it will nestle nicely in this market position, it tends to disappoint. Once you do follow your gut instincts you go for something because you've got a passionate conviction behind it. You've been influenced by the people who have also got a passion and conviction. You're often surprised by how well it does. And so you'll need that motivation, you want to be one.
And then I think you need transparency of accountability for people other than to you, to say whether you're doing it well. And I think a simple clear sense of this is what we've got to do and somebody else, whoever it may be, saying, well do you think you've done and why do you think you've done it and do other people think you've done it? It's not a bad system. Somebody else briefly mentioned, would all this be blown apart in a world of fragmentation and where channels have less and less meaning? Maybe. But I do think in a world where choice is no longer a freedom, the choice just becomes a complex in everyone's lives, to know there's certain places you can go where you will guarantee something that you want to watch, so you can cut through the complex of choice. That sense of a guarantee of taste, a guarantee of quality will still make channels very valuable things in the future.
And the final thing I'd say is innovation. We've talked about the creative signature of the programme maker. I think it is vital. I think it is one of the things that the more commodified market stands to get rid of, particularly outside drama and comedy - is the signature of the individual programmer as something that gets lost in the more commodified world. But beyond that I think there is a sense in the best of television - and I don't mean this in a sort of pompous way at all - of a sense there's a social purpose behind some of the programmes. People want to see something because they actually have got themselves het up about something that was going on, and I think the best television is still driven by conversation with an audience who obviously wants to enjoy itself. Television is about enjoying yourself. But it also expects television to be prepared at times to do more than just be enjoyable. We expect television to make the enjoyable stimulating and then to take on the stimulating and make the stimulating enjoyable. When it does that I think it does provoke a society into exploring itself.
One of the parallels I'll take away back to Britain from here is the really - the candour that I've heard here about what it means to work out what a multi-ethnic, multicultural society is going to be. And television it seems to me, now that's not an easy thing to work out. One of the things that irritates me most in Britain is the celebration about what multiculture is and that people actually be honest about just the nature of the changes that are taking place, and it's what makes it very stimulating and very interesting and sometimes quite dangerous. All those things that make you glad to be alive. But if television can do one thing well it can help represent all those different things that's of the merging culture, one to the other. When it does that I think it interrogates what we individual intellects do want to do and when it does that I think it allows people to explore their full potential both of themselves and the full imagination of what they want to be, but also what they want a good society to be.
And that is why, I think that sense of true individual stimulation and individual satisfaction - you get a better sort of society. That also sits at the heart of what public television is.
Steve Maharey: And finally I'll ask Michael Jackson to give his thoughts.
Michael Jackson: Well obviously we're all here to talk about our own domestic experiences and it's for you to extrapolate from that if at all relevant, but I suppose at this point the one thing I would say that occurs to me is that, you know, more money needs to be secured and spent here on not-for-profit purposes in broadcasting. And I think that's especially the case as not-for-profit broadcasting needs to go on the digital journey with its audiences. And so fundamentally believe that in this huge programme and channel bazaar that is going to exist in the future I really believe that not-for-profit public television, public broadcasting still has a fundamental purpose.
And indeed I would argue more so in this huge cacophony of choices, you need some senses of excellence. Some senses of different kinds of point of view, and people need to know where to find them. They need to be like lighthouses in the dark. And I think, as with Tim, I really do believe in, in the broadcaster. We all want a bit of a niche in our lives, but I also think we want moments that we share and we want those moments not simply to be profit, commercial moments. So, as I said earlier, I'm a believer in a strong centre but also in competition within not- for-profit, and I appreciate that in the UK we're fortunate enough to have enough money to be able to have that competition between different broadcasters. Here obviously you know something like [NZ on Air?] now has that role to play from an individual programme perspective, as opposed to a channel perspective and there's no doubt and certainly the UK proves this for what it's worth that multiple access points for producers, for independent producers is critical to advancing the system.
And finally I agree with Hugh's point that at least when I've been in the room not perhaps enough has been said about radio. I think it's indisputably the case that a dollar spent on radio probably buys you more benefit than a dollar spent on television just because the costs of radio are so much smaller. And I think one of the interesting things about Britain is that BBC radio has gone through an absolute renaissance in the past few years. Never been more popular, never been more successful - and in America I talked earlier about the travails of PBS, but national public radio in America is brilliant. It's very contemporary and it really unites groups of people around the nation who think and feel the same way but perhaps don't have access to decent newspapers or genuinely local television. And I don't think that - that in some ways we think of television as a medium that came after radio and therefore is more advanced. Actually, in some ways I think radio really is the medium of the future, especially in countries with very diverse and disparate populations. And so I definitely, even though I've never worked in radio in my life, I definitely feel that radio has a real future, part for the future.
Steve Maharey: We're coming close to half past five, but I did promise if anybody had something on their mind that they would like to just close this part of the session by making a quick comment or posing a very sharply focused question, so we can get a sharply focused answer. Let's to do that for five minutes.
Ian Taylor: I think - how do I make this sharp - I mean my concern would that I agree that when you read the charter, we didn't need it. That's what people were making. The concern I have about the charter is that the government may very well look at the funding that is applied to New Zealand on Air and think the best way to pay for this charter is to take it from there and give it to there and I don't think that's a good idea. There has been and I also […?] this debate about funding, we haven't made anything for TV3 for ages, but if we are to serve our audience well we have to take every opportunity we can to get these stories in front of them and if that includes funding, profit organisations who will help us meet that objective then we must be able to do it and we need some organisation in that space to help us get there.
Steve Maharey: I just wonder if anybody has - actually that isn't a question is it?
Ian Taylor: No.
Steve Maharey: It was an excellent comment. Any other comments that you really would like to quickly make?
Victoria Quade: A lot of talk about the future. Four people mentioned training. Terri Byrne, Auckland Access Radio; Hone Harawira Iwi Radio; Manu Taylor, Mai FM; and Jenni Morrell, children's television. If you're going to have a future, you've got to do a bit more investing in training.
Steve Maharey: Excellent comment. So where have we got to?
Gary Scott: I just want to sort of reiterate what Ian's saying [end of side of tape] . . . however if you look what kind of measure we could take out of what is bloody good television which is not a rating measure you look at television awards that have been held recently and correct me if I'm wrong but I think Dan, Dan's series won a couple, The Strip won a couple, [?] won a couple. These are pretty innovative programmes that were of you know very uniquely New Zealand and the people that really benefit from the contestability of the funding are the producers in the industry and therefore the audiences and the maintenance of that system is critical because you know we can't make the audience go to one channel, we have to go where they are if we want to give them unique New Zealand content.
? I have to say all of those programmes were on a broadcaster, none of them were on the public broadcasting
Steve Maharey: You know what you did then by not having the mike you're not getting recorded, but I'll say it for you, the comment out here so it's recorded for you was that all those programmes that you've mentioned were on a commercial channel. Okay then.
David Jacob: I'd just like to briefly say, yes please multiple access points but not multiple hurdles. If we have multiple hurdles in which good programmes, bloody good television programmes for hurdles that otherwise would be made if they didn't have to go through those multiple hurdles then we're diminishing the situation. Let's have multiple access points but let's not set up too many hurdles in our funding mechanisms and commissioning. Let's have lots of commissioning points but not too many hurdles.
Tino Pereira: Tino Pereira's my name. When I was growing up in Samoa, which is a small island in the North of New Zealand public broadcasting was in the form of a state radio. And it was quite interesting because it provided for us a programme remix which included the stories about our ancestors, the stories about our culture, the stories about what the Samoans are about, but also provided stories about when the next bus is arriving, when the next amount of money is coming from New Zealand. Whose mail is going to be received today and who needs to see the doctor. They legitimise our sense of nationhood, it added to the ethos and the essence of what we are. It basically is about the stories of our lives. I hope that's what the future of broadcasting in this country is about.
Steve Maharey: I think given that clap and given no hands are up and given that it's half past five and as a round up let me do this. Why did we come here today? Well our purpose was pretty simple. To have a conversation about the topic that's on the screen here - as everybody has said during the day this isn't a beginning and end point that we have met today to solve our policy issues. We're in a conversation at the moment which even when we get to do some of the things out of this won't stop, we'll carry on having to respond to a changing environment. That's why we're here today, to enrich, to speculate, to think, to raise ideas as part of that process and I want to thank you all for the way you've handled it. This is an audience here who are very used to putting their ideas, it's an articulate audience with lots to say and I think you've managed it incredibly well. Managed to say controversial things and listen to them and move onto the next point, it's been an excellent day from that point of view. I think we've confirmed today that we have a large mixture of broadcasting public, the names that have obviously bandied about a lot today, the public commercial community. We've talked a lot about the next streaming, all sorts of things that are happening in terms of new technologies and that is to bring it around that discussion and there have been a lot of ideas that have come out of today.
I think we've confirmed that we are excited about being New Zealanders. We're excited about what's happening with the culture industry that we're involved in both because they are industries and because of what they can contribute to our national identity. I take Hugh's point very well that in the old days part of the search for cultural identity was that ridiculous search for the great New Zealand novel, the great New Zealand film, the great New Zealand song, as if somehow we had to prove ourselves by only producing the best possible thing. Tim Finn put it very well when he said “Stop doing that, just produce stuff, just do it” and that's I think what we are seeing now in New Zealand. We are producing, we are feeling confident, we are succeeding in doing all these kinds of things and we don't preoccupy ourselves now with having to be obsessed with the great New Zealand novel, we just get on and start doing some pretty exciting things as you have been talking about today.
I thought the notion of not being complacent was very important today. We have huge challenges here but we don't quite know how to deal with them. Our international guests asserted that as well, this whole digital future, what's going to happen with convergence of technology. Huge challenges to what we currently do with television and radio which can't leave us anything other than uncomplacent about what we are trying to do. I thought the point that came through all the way today was relevance. And the biggest points that were mentioned by speaker after speaker was connect with the audience. Connect with what people are doing and it's certainly been the theme that I've seen come out of most of the speeches today. I think importantly too people have constantly reminded themselves that what we're talking to here are people who are buried in the industry. They believe in what they're doing, they are passionate about what they can see as the role of broadcasting but we know that if we're going to have public broadcasting in whatever form it evolves into, it will require public funding and that means convincing the ordinary New Zealander that this matters, and it does matter alongside roads and hip replacements and everything else that's being contested as part of the taxpayer dollar. That's a big ask, and it requires us to go out of here and talk to people, communicate to them that these things really matter. We do that through broadcasting mainly because we demonstrate its importance by the way that we broadcast, but that's a conversation with them we've got to have from here.
We know that the Screen Council needs to finish its work we'll hear some more about that undoubtedly from Jim Anderton at the SPADA conference tomorrow if you're around for that. We have to finish off the process of talking through Maori broadcasting policy which is still going on. We have the strategy we are talking about here for broadcasting. All of that as I said will come back together and dovetail over the next little while as that work is done so we have a coherent approach to where we go from here, so we'll need to continue talking. We'll need to continue reaction to the stocktake, we'll need to continue making sure these ideas are getting circulated so when they are brought back together we feel that we have certainly benefited from all of this conversation.
I want to stress as a last point in terms of reaction to what's been said, there is the one about independence. It's something that matters a great deal to me. I think one of the weaknesses that we do have in our system, reflected by our international guests, is that we have a system now without a licence fee, and there is a feeling that a system like that can easily be one which is seen to be too close to the political process. Whatever we do out of this we have to make sure we set up a robust, independent, autonomous broadcasting sector which may annoy politicians, should annoy politicians - but they can't do what somebody mentioned today, pick up the phone and ring and say “I don't like that programme” and have the person on the other end of the phone say “good I'll take it off”. I don't actually ring to say that, I would have liked to have said that for example in relation to The Big Night In. I thought that was a subversive act that programme, but I never rang anybody to say I didn't like that programme because it is not my place to do so. It's the place of the broadcasters and so on, and so I think in this environment I have to be doubly careful. Politicians have to be doubly careful about the way they react to programmes and we don't do it. Independence is something we should really fight hard to make sure we come out of this discussion about broadcasting ensuring it becomes something of a touchstone of our broadcasting systems.
It remains for me to thank people. There are a lot of people to thank, so I will do that not by going through you all, I just want to thank the organisers today. There have been many. I think you have put together a very interesting programme today. It's certainly, as Tim said, held all of our interest, it's not been the normal conference. It's been formatted in the way and the dialogue's been there to keep our interest all the way through of what we have been doing. Thank you to all of the panellists who were so stimulating today. It's not by accident that we have people here who did drop a few hand grenades and so on because we wanted that cross section of point of view in the room. This was not to be a debate amongst people who agree with each other before they got here. It was supposed to be stimulating.
I do want to thank our international guests. The value of having you here has been tremendous because you have brought in if I can say so a kind of humility of being on the outside which we value but you have certainly put on the table a lot of your experience, your thoughts which people I know from their actions here have taken, taken to very well. So thank you too, Bob Collins, Tim Gardam, Michael Jackson and Greg Dyke who was with us last night by satellite. But at the end of this programme on a new future for public broadcasting I was trying to think how to clsoe the conference. There's a person who is soon be leave us from the broadcasting fraternity at least from the position that they are in, who has been in broadcasting for 34 years, who has been a chief executive of Radio New Zealand who began a broadcasting career as an announcer and a shopping reporter, who has been on our radio in various guises as one of our leading broadcasters for 34 years, who has been awarded a Harkness Scholarship in Journalism at Harvard University. She has been a corporate director of public affairs in the then Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand, she's been a talkback host, she's been a radio host for Nine to Noon. She's been on National Radio for a long time. She's the recipient of the OBE for services to broadcasting. She's a person that I thought to close a programme like this today where we are talking about the future - reminds us about the excellence of the past that we are going to build on. She's Sharon Crosbie and I wonder Sharon if you would come forward. I'd like to give you some flowers because I can't be with you when a farewell takes place soon and I thought you symbolise just the excellence of broadcasting in this country.
END OF TRANSCRIPT