‘Listeners Favour Private Radio’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31167, 17 September 1966, Page 3

‘Listeners Favour Private Radio’

(Aeic Zealand Press Association*

HAMILTON, September 16.

More than 70 per cent of Auckland’s 600,000 people favour private broadcasting in competition with the N.Z.8.C., says an Auckland radio pirate for whom a firm of industrial psychologists has made a survey of radio listeners.

Mr H. Saunders, of Sydney, managing director of the pirate radio station, Radio International, said he ordered the survey soon after he arrived in New Zealand.

“I had made my own private survey, talking to cab drivers, people in the street, barmaids —anybody and everybody—as soon as I got here,” he said.

“It was obvious to me that a proper survey should be made.” The full returns from the survey are still secret. But Mr Saunders said they showed that 76 per cent of the people interviewed agreed that overseas radio programmes were much better than New Zealand’s.

Sixty per cent said they were not satisfied with present commercial radio programmes, 11 per cent said they were, and 29 per cent were non-committal.

Mr A. L. Boyes, public relations officer of the N.Z.8.C., said in Wellington today that

the N.Z.B.C. was very inter- ; ested that such a survey had been made by Radio Interj national and would like to (study the results. It would be impossible to (comment further on it without seeing the figures and knowing the conditions under which the survey had been made.