The high costs of broadcasting

Press, 29 November 1976, Page 16

The high costs of broadcasting

By

CEDRIC MENTIPLAY

Less than four years ago the great New Zealand experiment in broadcasting was begun. Quick-growth techniques were injected into what had been the formalised slow-growth plantation of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. in that time the stately pathways and cadences of the old 8.8. C.-style New Zealand service were invaded and inundated by rich tropical growth. Perhaps the experiment moved too quickly because of New Zealand’s inexorable threeyearly electoral system, but it seems now that too little attention was paid to whether the new growth would produce a practicable crop or a proliferation of useless weed. The sad thing is that even now nobody seems to know the answers. The great experiment has been discontinued, but the components keep on growing and proliferating. They have to, for individually and collectively they are not parts of a government department, and so cannot be curbed as are the departments by an annual need to make estimates, revise them, and have the results of that revision investigated by the treasury, the Public Expenditure Committee, and finally by the Cabinet.

No great experiment is easily reversed. The enormous outpouring of effort and money (largely expended overseas) which characterised the Labour effort under Mr R. O. Douglas cannot be simply shut off. The three corporations continue to operate in what is a day-to-day situation, with no real guarantee of a continuance of their present capacity into 1977. The Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) suspected early that the rich and expensive growth which followed the Labour three-corporation system had not been backed by adequate financial planning. When the new chair-

man of the Broadcasting Council (Mr R. A. Jarden) was appointed earlier this year, the choice was made on his known ability to plan financially and economically. It was no surprise to some that he condemned the short-haul financial view and bluntly declared the system close to bankruptcy. The figures are colossal. He asked for a short-term deferment of the payment time for $837,000, for a long-term decision to cancel this payment altogether, and for the conversion of national development loans amounting to S36M to non-interest-bearing capital grants. Mr Muldoon has allowed a short deferment at a charge of 10 per cent on the $837,000 interest, a wicked but by no means unusual financial device of interest-on-interest of which many medium-income home-build-ers have had experience. Mr Jarden is unhappy, and has said so.

It is getting somewhat like the personality clashes we have seen in other matters this year, but perhaps that is an over-sim-plification. Mr Jarden shrugged his shoulders when apprised of the decision and commented: “It’s just wasting my time and theirs. I’ll be back in three months for another bite.” Mr Muldoon’s comment on Mr Jarden’s comment (and sometimes this sort Of thing is as embarrassing to journalists as to Ministers or to businessmen) has simply been that another paper on the long-term financial structure of broadcasting will be before the Cabinet before the end of the session, and will be discussed before Christmas.

His reason for charging interest on the deferred sum is that no case has been established at present for the taxpayers to offer broadcasting a subsidy, which a free extension of the interest payment would be. It seems,

however, that' whatever the long-term solution is, taxpayer contribution must be a part of it. In all this uncertainty, however, one message is coming through loud and clear.

In the words of the Minister of Broadcasting (Mr Templeton) it is: “The three corporations have been rescued from a state of insolvency which would have threatened wage and salary payments within a few weeks ... the broadcasting services cannot expect to remain independent of the State when public moneys have to be used to rescue it from insolvency.” This carries unhappy overtones for broadcasting staff who have openly opposed the Government’s restructuring effort. Mr Muldoon has been scornful of the “lack of financial sense" displayed by Labour’s offspring. He has also .stressed the need for a higher degree of accountability.

What has especially drawn his ire is twofold — the number of journalists (he places it as “well over 300”) on the staff of the 8.C.N.Z., and the apparently high salaries paid. He has spoken bluntly of the attitudes he alleges are adopted by denziens of the,“Tower of Babel” at Avalon *(which is TVI headquarter’s), and has often described as antiGovemmdnt” a proportion of their output. Mr Muldoon has gone on record as having no desire to control the quality or content of news as broadcast. Perhaps it is easier for a government to slay the hydra-headed monster in its path by denying it sustenance, or by switching off its energy sources. There is considerable evidence of extravagance in the three-headed system, opposing teams from TVI and TV2 covering the same highcost overseas events, longterm research, development and production being sud-