Newshub staff left heartbroken by closure proposal, Parliament repeals New Zealand's smokefree law and employees query leap year pay in the latest NZ Herald headlines. Video / NZ Herald
Media and Communications Minister Melissa Lee has denied she downplayed the closure of Newshub in her initial response on Wednesday, but admitted she might not have articulated it well.
Lee had said on Wednesday there was nothing the Government could have done to stop the closure, and had downplayed the impact of losing one of the two main news channels in the television sector, saying plurality was not an issue because it was now a multi-media world, and radio and newspaper sites were also creating video.
On whether she was comfortable that people turning on their televisions would only have one option, she said: “Well, there’s Sky as well. There’s a whole lot of other media as well.”
News First at 5.30, which broadcasts on Sky TV’s free-to-air channel Sky Open (formerly Prime), is produced by Newshub - something Lee was forced to admit in Parliament in Question Time on Thursday.
Asked by media if she was taking the collapse of Newshub - the main competitor to TVNZ - seriously, Lee said she was.
“I am taking it seriously. I think yesterday when I started my comments, I did actually say I was feeling for the staff who would have been shocked and devastated by the news and perhaps I wasn’t as articulate as I could have been. But I am actually taking this seriously.”
She said she was not downplaying the impact of the closure and was talking to key players to see what they could do to invest in the New Zealand sector. However, she said she did not believe it was the Government’s role to provide that relief.
“I do realise that the decision that was made yesterday by Warner Brothers Discovery will have flow-on effects to other sectors, including the production sector. I am very cognisant of that,” Lee said.
“I will be having continuous conversations with more stakeholders to see if there is any relief available, but I do not see that it is the Government’s job to actually provide the relief.”
Government caught on the hop?
Although it has been clear for some time media outlets were struggling with a revenue drop in recent years, the announcement Newshub’s news operations would close from June unless a white knight investor came forward appeared to have caught the Government on the hop.
The National Party did not release a broadcasting policy ahead of the election, despite repeated requests for it by the NZ Herald.
Associate Finance Minister David Seymour, who is a shareholding minister in TVNZ, said the coalition partners had not discussed broadcasting policy.
“However, it’s clearly a very important area of policy that is changing and is of interest to a lot of people and I suspect this latest closure means the Government is now going to have to grapple with it. That’s why, as just one minister with one small area of responsibility, I’ve asked some questions about it.”
He denied it was a blind spot. “We just thought that the immediate priorities would be other things as the Government formed. But as someone once said, ‘what makes up politics? Events’.”
NZ First leader Winston Peters said the closure of Newshub was “a massive shock” and the issues facing media could no longer be ignored.
“We’ve got to sit down and examine what we’re looking at because, as I said, the Fourth Estate is in crisis in my view. And we have gone back 37 years now all of a sudden, a giant leap backwards. So the idea of just ignoring it should not be happening,” Peters said.
“We should be very carefully and quietly thinking over the next few days and weeks what can be done.”
Seymour on Wednesday said he had asked for advice on the state of TVNZ and whether it was a level playing field - including the issue of whether TVNZ should pay a dividend. It has not done so in recent years.
David Seymour is one of TVNZ's shareholding ministers. Photo / Alex Burton
Seymour said today he had not made any comment about requiring a dividend, but had asked whether TVNZ was making a good return on equity relative to other similar companies. He said it was a prudent thing to do “and I wouldn’t read too much into it”.
“A question I think people really need to ask is ‘is the taxpayer getting good value for the companies it owns?’ Now, when you’ve just seen a major competitor leave the market because they don’t think they can get enough return, I think it would be pretty irresponsible not to ask the basic question.”
He said it might turn out TVNZ was doing well “in which case, the taxpayer as a shareholder might expect a bigger cut”.
Seymour has previously called for TVNZ to be required to pay a dividend to put it on a more equal footing with commercial media. He issued that call when in Opposition in 2019 at the time MediaWorks were selling TV3. In a press release at the time, Seymour said TVNZ’s government support put TV3 at a disadvantage. “Any normal private business must pay dividends to their shareholders, as MediaWorks has, but TVNZ is not under the same commercial pressure to be profitable.”
Asked what she thought about TVNZ being required to pay that dividend, Lee said TVNZ was facing its own revenue issues.
“But you know, under the current situation, its global impact with revenue dropping, with advertising dropping and I think it’s something we all have to look at and see what happens.”
She said she wanted TVNZ to be making world-class programmes and news.
Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the NZ Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
