Brian Rudman: English strangles our cultural airwaves

Jonathan Coleman challenges Radio National to cut costs - even at the expense of dumbing-down. Cartoon / Rod Emmerson

Listening to Finance Minister Bill English on TVNZ's Q and A current affairs show on Sunday, he seemed to be accusing Radio New Zealand of planning a ritual self-mutilation of its extremities, solely to cause embarrassment to the Government.

"What you saw last week was a bit old-style civil service politics where they wheel out something unacceptable and try and get pressure back on members of Parliament. I was pretty disappointed," said Mr English.

His remarks followed the Radio New Zealand board's declaration that if the Government carried out its threat to freeze or cut its funding, the public broadcasters would have to consider such options as vacating its Auckland building, finding sponsorship for classical Concert FM, killing night broadcasts and reverting to AM frequency broadcasting for most of the country - Auckland excepted.

But, given the ultimatum the RNZ board received, what did Mr English expect it to come up with?

Broadcasting Minister Jonathan Coleman had told state radio that, like all government-funded organisations, its grant was to be frozen for up to five years.

TVNZ's ONE News reported Dr Coleman's warning board members to come up with a plan for this sinking-funds policy, or be replaced with more malleable substitutes.

If anything was "unacceptable" and "disappointing" it was this bullying. Not that Mr English saw it that way.

He told Q and A his advice to Radio NZ, and to the Department of Conservation, which has a similar battle with the Finance Minister's razor gang, "is they can't wait this out, they're capable of being creative and flexible and providing better value for money and if they focused a bit more on the services and a little less on the politics, I'm sure they'd get ahead".

The cheap shot about poor service was badly timed. Last year, Radio New Zealand National was named New Zealand's best radio station in the NZ Radio Awards, the first time a non-commercial public service broadcaster has won the industry's top award.

It won a raft of other prizes, from best coverage of a news event - the 2008 USA election, through to winner of the best broadcast recording for "Salmonella Dub/New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Live at Aotea Centre."

As for providing value for money, a KPMG review of RNZ funding in 2007 said the broadcaster was already on stale bread rations, was understaffed and needed more than $10 million extra in annual income.

What Mr English and Dr Coleman have to come clean on is, if the cuts the board has suggested are considered "unacceptable" - or should that read "embarrassing" - to the Government, what more insidious ways of bleeding the organisation have they got in mind?

How much does the Government think a public broadcasting network should cost? New Zealand already spends less on this per capita than most of the other First World countries we like to compare ourselves with.

A research paper prepared for the Ministry for Culture and Heritage by Unitec School of Communications dated December 2005, shows that of the 30 OECD countries, New Zealand's spending per capita on public broadcasting was at $45.2, well below the mean of $66. The Australians paid $83.2 each, the British, $143.6, the Swiss and Norwegians, $163.6 and Icelanders, $216.3.

At the bottom was Mexico with no public broadcasting, the USA, on $1.85 per capita and Turkey on $5.26.

Threatening Radio New Zealand with a stomach bypass, like its proposal to open up our national parks to the coalminers' bulldozers, is hardly a sign the Government really has a grand economic plan.

The Prime Minister's dream is to close the gap with Australia.

His focus is the wage differential, but higher wages are not the only factor regulating the transtasman migration. Lifestyle and culture is another pull, both restraining and driving the outflow.

Applying the pruning shears to a mainstay of New Zealand cultural life such as Radio New Zealand is alarming in itself, not just because it provides another reason to cross the Tasman.

If RNZ is on the cutback list, what's the future for state-supported culture in general?

Are we being softened up for a budget announcement from Mr English that to be consistent, there will also be no increase in funds over the next five years for Creative New Zealand - the mainstay of arts organisation up and down the land, for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, for Te Papa, for film, for sport and for all the other cultural activities that help make it worth continuing to live on this side of the Tasman?

Of all our state-funded cultural institutions, Radio New Zealand is probably the most vital of all. It's the town hall of a community of 4.35 million people, widely dispersed from North Cape to Stewart Island.

It costs under $9 per person a year to run. For that small outlay we provide ourselves the only venue to hear extended and serious discussions on politics, the arts, medicine, lifestyle - you name it. We also provide for ourselves a newsroom with valuable competition for the two or three big metropolitan papers.

RNZ also broadcasts concerts from performers, both local and international, to audiences with limited access to the main centre auditoriums.

Dr Coleman's musings about padding out funding with sponsorship is alarming.

Not only does it risk drying up the income streams of struggling cultural groups which already rely on this dwindling pool of cash, but he only has to look at the tragic wreck that is charter-based Television New Zealand, to see what happens when a public broadcaster is forced to rely on the commercial dollar.

Only on the isolated non-commercial digital fringes of TVNZ, Channels 6 and 7, do you get a reminder of what public broadcasting is supposed to be about. If, as Mr English says, the board of Radio New Zealand was playing politics in raising the alarm, then all praise to its members.

If it's made the Government think again, then let us all praise them again.