Watching the bubble grow

The time is right for a huge, committed drive by the public to stand up for their innate right to quality public broadcasting and a Youth Radio Network, argues Mike Chunn in his latest Strange News blog.

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Recent times witnessed the scrambling flurry of thousands of New Zealanders to invest money in finance companies that emphasised the construction and sale of buildings as a way to earn a high rate of interest. We know this as most have disintegrated to dust and it was primetime news. With this lure many borrowed money at lowish interest rates and then invested it with those aforementioned finance companies. Hundreds of millions of lost dollars later those people are crushed and will be paying off loans for some time (forever?).

Who was watching this bubble grow? All of us.

Who predicted the annihilation of huge numbers of investment companies? The business sections of the newspapers? Academics in high places? Businessmen themselves? Anyone?

The Global Financial Crisis flew in from outer space like an asteroid and not only did it smash into New Zealand, it hit virtually every civilised country on the planet especially Iceland, Portugal, Greece and Ireland. Ireland? Yes Ireland.

IN 1999, an Irishman, one Dr Michael Higgins, came to New Zealand at the invitation of Creative New Zealand to attend the “Counting The Cultural Beat” broadcasting symposium in Wellington. Higgins had recently been Broadcasting Minister and Minister of the Arts in Ireland and his keynote address was titled “Active citizens or passive consumers? Culture, Democracy and Public Service Broadcasting in the era of the unaccountable market”.

His visit was timed well. Arthur Baysting, writer/director of the music writers’ association APRA had spent five years targeting the National government over the dire lack of NZ music on commercial radio. The unaccountable market. Arthur was being beaten up in the media. He rolled with the punches.

Parallel to this, Baysting and primarily Neil Finn were lobbying for a Youth Radio Network (YRN): a young persons’ National Radio. Commercial broadcasters rallied all their forces against that one and while NZ music on commercial radio became a winning platform, the YRN drifted away by 2002 with the new Labour government focused on quotas.

But to return to the good Dr Higgins. At this symposium he said:

“Broadcasting now stands to be judged as a production space for commodified entertainment rather than that public space where citizens listen and view to be informed, educated or entertained…..

“With digitalization comes an entirely new set of policy decisions which policy makers cannot avoid. For example, there will be competition between political providers as to mode of delivery. It will be important to insist that content is even more important than capacity. The debate cannot afford to be exclusively technical except at a huge democratic cost. Blurring the values content of the new revolution suits the conglomerates who benefit from a concentration of ownership as much as it weakens citizenship.

“The shared space will come under threat and we should remember the injunction of one great writer on broadcasting – “We humanise what is going on in the world and within ourselves only by speaking of it and in the course of speaking about it we learn to be human.”

“One of the important benefits of having a vibrant public service broadcasting arrangement is that in addition to inviting citizens to experience the timeless, the universal, the unimagined, it is also a rich source of creativity – a creativity that is not confined to the broadcasting station or to one activity”.

This was at the end of last century.

At the end of last week, 10th November 2011 to be precise, one Michael Steadman gave the John O’Shea Memorial Address in Auckland at the opening of the Spada conference. Steadman is managing director of Natural History New Zealand, a producer of factual programmes that are broadcast around the world.. He said:

“The current Minister (of Broadcasting) appears to be of the view that all citizen’s needs can be met by commercial broadcasting including SKY and that the market should rule…. You are the Minister of Broadcasting in all its forms and that brings with it the responsibility to ensure that there is more on offer to air than the completely commercial and advertising driven programming that is commercial television.

“The assumption that all needs can be met by a commercial market also begs an important question. Is the television market driven, responding to what people want or does television create and control the market?

Where does our public responsibility lie?

If the best choice we can offer the viewer from our current line-up of advertiser friendly programming relates to which dog show they like or which cooking show or which American crime show, then we put our audience in cultural jeopardy.

“Have we grown a market which believes that offering different flavours of candy floss is real choice? New Zealanders deserve, and have a fundamental right to a great deal more choice.”

So I ask you, dear reader – has anything changed?

The time is right for a huge, committed drive by the public to stand up for their innate right to quality public broadcasting. The time is right for that Youth Radio Network to be established. This is because the modern technology doesn’t require one of those rare, naked frequencies from an FM band to be allocated. The internet platforms for programme delivery are bounteous and with a brave, honest governmental stance this will happen so that the intuitive, insightful young leaders of tomorrow will be heard. They will engage their peers in all corners of New Zealand and on into the world. They will ask, demand and enquire.

Five years ago as adults throughout New Zealand sought financial prizes in an ignorant and naïve gold rush, a Youth Radio Network would have been breaking out on streaming, Podcast and blog environments asking the right questions and probing the right people to alert this small, gullible nation about the reality of such a collective lust for nothingness.

It can happen today. Young NZers are bright and intuitive. They have the wherewithal and motivation to start a public broadcasting environment and make it work. All it needs is a government that can see this…. And a commercial broadcasting regime that lets them do it.

To let the good Dr Higgins have the last words:

“At the bases of the choices we will make in the next few years are some fundamental value choices involving such questions as –
- What value do we put on the public world?
- What value do we put on issues beyond the immediate, beyond a single life span?
- How do we wish to remember and to be remembered?”

In the tattered, financially annihilated Ireland of today, Dr Michael Higgins was recently elected President – by more than a million votes.