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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 39, Number 14, 5 July 1976.

Conclusions

Conclusions

(1)The present news services do not cost as much as the Government claims they do.
(2)Even if they do cost $6m and 10 percent of overall broadcasting expenditure, that would not be "expensive" when compared with similar operations in Britain The 10 percent figure is normal, and the $6m actual cost would be cheap, considering the physical areas covered and outputs per week of the NZ TV services. Incidentally, it is unfair to compare the news' percentage cost with its percentage of air time, because news is one hour per night, seven nights per week of peak (i.e. high quality) programming.
(3)The sum that could be saved by amalgamation, is miniscule. According to one source very high in Avalon, it might even cost more.
(4)The Government never had, and still does not have sufficient financial and technical information on which to base a policy decision to amalgamate news for financial reasons. To convince the public, it relies on misleading arguments like "its wasteful to send two helicoptors to film the same event". That sounds sensible, but ignores the extraordinarily high cost of duplicating film, which makes it cheaper to send the two crews.
(5)The Governments statements have been shot through with contradictions. For example Mr Jacob-son of Templeton's office said on 27 May that he couldn't say what the Governments plans for the news were, because "the Minister doesn't have the figures yet". These were to be found in the Corporations' Annual Reports, which would be tabled in Parliament, "which hasn't met yet" [source: phone interview with Jacobson]. Well, the Governments policy was released on 22 June, one day before Parliament met. The Annual Reports still have not been published and Ron Jarden says they don't contain the necessary information anyway.

A further example. Since the beginning of the Governments talk about news amalgamations, Templeton has given the impression there will be no redundancy - only a staff non-replacement policy. At Avalon last Saturday he stated to broadcasting journalists that there would be no redundancy when the second news team disappears. But under questioning he said journalists should be looking to their redundancy agreement and that there had already been talks to that effect with the PSA. But (again!) PSA president Jim Turner was present and denied that there had been such talks, [source: responsible spokesman for broadcasting journalists - contacted on 29/6].

The decision to merge the news was not really made for financial reasons. The contradiction in the Governments assertion, that it "knows savings can be made" but does not know how or how much (even vaguely) is now becoming too burdensome to maintain. It makes statements like "economising on news costs would enable the Government to speed up expanded coverage of TV2 transmission into country areas" [Post 16/6/76 look very dubious.

So now they appear to be putting a new argument that the separate news services may be ultravires the the Broadcasting Act. This was the first matter Ron Jarden mentioned, in a phone interview on 30 June. He immediately qualified his words, saying "of course that's water under the bridge now, but it does show that the journalists' behaviour has been unnecessarily spontaneous. They should have jumped up and down in 1973.

Details of the argument: S1 1(I) (C) of the 1973 Act makes it the general function of the BCNZ "To gather news and make it available to TV I and TV 2 for their use in the planning, production, and presentation of news bulletins and related programmes..." The argument is, that this means "these shall be one news gatherer, BCNZ". It is true that separate news services were not established immediately upon commencement of the 1973 Act. They developed subsequently upon agreement between the corporations and a liberal BCNZ Board.

However, the suggestion that this agreement is a violation of S1 l(i)(c) is both an insult and serious allegation against the BCNZ Board, and legally untenable.

A proper construction of the Act must look at the commonly accepted meaning of the words "for their use in the.... production of news." "Production" includes filming, that is, includes the news gathering function, "their use" plainly means use by TV1 and TV2, i.e. separately BCNZ can provide stories, or film, but the corporations separately have a clear power to plan, film, as well as present their own footage. And by S 53(h) and S56 the corproations have powers to arrange production of "programmes". News is a program. Thus the attempt to replace the increasingly difficult to maintain "financial efficiency" argument cannot succeed.

Cartoon playing on American Gothic painting, with the man whistling