Jim Hopkins: Gummint's TV ratings game is just not logical

If the world was a logical place there'd be no debate about a non-commercial, public television channel. What else could it be, folk would inquire, in a state of perplexment and bewilderness.

It's what we do with radio. And it's what we should do with TV, if only to ensure the proper separation of commerce and state.

No one in their right mind wants gummint channels crammed with ads and charging 12-year-olds 90c a call to vote for chubby singers on talent quests.

The gummint should regulate such outrageous behaviour but it certainly shouldn't promote it.

Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to see a jolly good herbal iridologist ASAP. And there the matter would end - if the world was a logical place.

But we know that the world is not a logical place.

If it were, we'd have an SCC as well as an ACC; there'd be a Sickness Compensation Corporation right next door to the Accident Compensation Corporation.

Alternatively, we wouldn't have either.

But it's utterly illogical to have a universal, compulsory insurance scheme for accidents (with levies related to risk) and a compulsory, progressive tax system paying for sicknesses.

In a logical world, people would say, "That's silly. Do it one way, or the other."

Moreover, in a logical world we'd zone supermarkets long before we zoned schools.

Valuable and beneficial it may be, but education could never be called a necessity of survival in the way that food is. We could survive without formal education but we'd be fertilising the playground toot sweet if we didn't have food.

So, if zoning is absolutely essential then, logically, we would first apply it to absolutely essential things - like supermarkets - and sort the schools out later.

Or we'd shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, people are free to choose their own supermarkets, petrol stations, bookshops, builders, haberdashers, dentists and herbal irridilogists, so of course they should do the same with schools."

It's not the gummint's job to subsidise real estate agents!

Alas, such incompatible incongruities abound.

In a logical world, for example, children would be treated with the same idealised respect before birth as they are treated after.

We'd no more tolerate the violence of abortion than we do the violence of child abuse.

Or we would say, "Look, it's a parent's right to choose and leave the young to their own devices".

It's the same with broadcasting. In a logical world, the gummint would operate its radio and television interests in an identical manner. If television was commercial, then radio would be too.

But if non-commercial radio is imperative (as its listeners would appear to believe) then it's axiomatic that the eyes of the nation should be treated the same as the ears.

Alternatively, get out. Tell the 4 million people in the city of New Zealand that the gummint's got better things to do with their money and quit; stop funding Radio New Zealand and Maori TV and Television New Zealand to boot - which we all like doing.

Not that either will happen. Not on your telly. What will happen is what's been happening. We'll continue to take an utterly contrary approach to sound and vision.

And we'll continue to get masses of ads and boastful promotions.

We'll continue to get programmes that struggle to meet the contradictory requirements of charter and ratings - don't miss Celebrity Kakapo Hunt, folks.

And we'll continue to have a situation where the gummint can't manage any potentially adverse social impacts of television because it's raking in the dosh by committing the sort of "sins" it might otherwise control.

Sadly, the fact that this week's proposal for change has the same mandarin ring as the disastrous Citizens for Rowling campaign won't help the case one Idolota. But that doesn't invalidate the proposition.

Let's discuss what we can afford, by all means. And how it might be funded - perhaps, in part, by leasing TV2 and levying commercial stations as they do in Britain to fund Channel 4.

And let's discuss how a non-commercial channel could be structured to prevent it turning into the kind of doctrinaire, ideologically complacent fiefdom that Radio New Zealand has become.

But let's not assert that expense negates logic. If small is beautiful, as they say, that could just as easily apply to budgets as it does to ecological footprints.

A non-commercial channel prudently funded by 4 million people might, of necessity, display the same sort of low-cost "No 8 wire" innovation we've seen elsewhere.

The point is this. Any gummint broadcaster can only ever have one legitimate and logical aim and it's not to steal childhoods the way Shortland Street does every weeknight at 7pm.

Chasing ratings by broadcasting murders, robberies, violence and rock videos is something a gummint should regulate, not undertake. Essentially, this is the broadband debate with ad breaks. And a player can never be an adequate referee - in either field.

There's no logical reason for the gummint to run a channel full of ads.

The only logical reason for the gummint to be a broadcaster is to transmit a range of unfettered, impartial, contentious, provocative, off-beat, whimsical, radical, conservative, zany and lateral ideas - sometimes to its own detriment - that commercial restraints might otherwise leave unexplored.

And if it doesn't want to do that then, logically, it shouldn't do anything.