Hard News: "Creative" and "Flexible"
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Certainly the moderate Left doesn't differ from the moderate Right very much on the issue of revenue. They even have the same people voting for them, just at different times. There aren't any new ideas from a Grand Vision perspective, just new words.
I'm not sure if this is such a bad thing, TBH. "Wearyingly boring" does describe our politics, but interesting politics (like what you have in Italy) don't seem better.
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Not to mention how the liberal Left in this country has bought pretty much wholesale the neoconservative arguments about trimming the fat and using the market to support anything that moves.
I wonder if this is fallout from the historical accident in which New Zealand's liberal Left and neoconservative Right were the same people for a few topsy-turvy years...
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but interesting politics (like what you have in Italy) don't seem better.
Tou fucking chè.
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Not to mention how the liberal Left in this country has bought pretty much wholesale the neoconservative arguments about trimming the fat and using the market to support anything that moves. There simply isn't a money crisis. They're cutting their own taxes! But apparently we should just allow advertising into our public radios, or even suggest to can of them ourselves, to pay for their privilege. Unbelievable really.
I can't buy that Giovanni. I think if the left was more responsible with money, and more willing to look at trimming fat where it existed, then the right wouldn't have gained so much ground in the past thirty years.
Take some real fat, point it out, and then trim the fat, the meat, and hack into the bone. And then put some fat back on, but only for your new market driven management structure. That's what we've been through.
If the real fat wasn't there in the first place, it would have been a much harder move for the right to make. The idea that being left wing can't mean being responsible with money drives me nuts.
I don't buy the argument that the market should support everything that moves. The NZSO is a mixture of govt funding and private funding and ticket sales. Maori TV sells advertising and receives govt funding. They seem to me to be as important to NZ as Concert, yet it's fully funded?
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Not to mention how the liberal Left in this country has bought pretty much wholesale the neoconservative arguments about trimming the fat and using the market to support anything that moves.
'Neoconservative arguments'? What is this? PAS bingo?
Just to stand on my own soap box for a second: when someone argues for the state to fund something what they're actually saying is that they want their fellow-taxpayers to fund it. There's a mentality on the left that public revenue magically appears in the crown accounts in infinite amounts but the reality is that people have worked hard to create that wealth and since we're a very small, reasonably poor country there's a very limited amount of it.
So when people say that they should get their own radio station that plays the music they like with no ads and the taxpayer should pay for it I think it's reasonable to ask how such expenditure can be justified. And when the response is a laughable tantrum about neoconservatism and complaints that the same music available for free on the internet is of lower quality then it really just reinforces my initial prejudice.
I can't help but feel that the right would have less sympathy with voters if the left didn't have this tendency to piss away taxpayer money on self-indulgent white elephants. Which would you rather have: a commercial classical radio station or Paula Bennett as Welfare Minister?
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and complaints that the same music available for free on the internet is of lower quality
Let's add the complete inability of the digerati to look outside their own area of competence or examine their privilege.
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Kyle, agreed Maori TV is the best public TV broadcaster and it should be fully funded. This failure isn't a reason for Concert FM & NatRNZ to be in anyway made commercial.
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They seem to me to be as important to NZ as Concert, yet it's fully funded?
Whatchatalkingabout, Willis? Maori TV is a television channel, it has a HUGE budget compared to Radio New Zealand Concert. I'm not saying it should be otherwise, mind, but let's keep a vague sense of perspective.
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I think if the left was more responsible with money, and more willing to look at trimming fat where it existed, then the right wouldn't have gained so much ground in the past thirty years.
Fat? What fat? Russell, a day ago:
But the board has a credible answer to English's injunction that Radio NZ focus on being "creative and flexible, and providing better value for money," from its current operation. To wit: it is, and has been doing that, according to the KPMG review of its baseline funding in 2007, which found no fat to trim at the broadcaster. Indeed, the review found that Radio New Zealand was underfunded and understaffed and did not pay its existing staff enough. In the coming budget year, the shortfall, according to KPMG, will reach about $10 million.
Postively anorexic, more like.
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I can't help thinking that RNZ's success with such high audiences is a BIG target for private stations to take aim at.
I guess that was the motivation for excluding RNZ from the highly dubious radio surveys, or sticking them in an "Other" category.
How does bfm fund itself? I am all for assisting them in widening their transmission range.
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Whatchatalkingabout, Willis? Maori TV is a television channel, it has a HUGE budget compared to Radio New Zealand Concert. I'm not saying it should be otherwise, mind, but let's keep a vague sense of perspective.
So your argument is "it wouldn't save much, so it's not worth doing"?
Two of my immediate family members work in government departments. Last year both had to cut into their budget by some percentage. The total amount cut from one department was greater than the total budget (pre-cut) of the other department.
Being small might make it not a priority but "it'll only save a million or two" doesn't seem like a valid argument for not looking at the budget of an organisation. Still _real_ money after all.
Fat? What fat? Russell, a day ago:
I think that report assumes "no advertising". Clearly if you opened up the radio station to advertising or sponsorship, there's money to be earned.
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So your argument is "it wouldn't save much, so it's not worth doing"?
I'm still waiting for somebody to convince me that anything needs doing at all. I want to expand public services, not reduce them. It seems that we have run out of money, except for tax cuts and funding private schools. Now if you'll excuse me I'm bowing out of this conversation because I am in turn running out of desks.
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Tou fucking chè.
I can appreciate that countering Berlusconi might actually require a strong left, that a massive change from his kind of leadership would probably be a good thing, possibly even to the extent of making it illegal to have so much power. We haven't had a crisis like that yet to expose the huge flaws in our total lack of constitution. Perhaps that's because it's a moderate place, it hasn't been necessary, or it hasn't been expedient to risk such a crisis. Muldoon was famously talked out of exploiting it, not because it was a wrong thing to do, but because Labour could then do it. Some tinkering here and there is all we ever get. "Piecemeal social engineering" as Popper might have said (and approved of).
Oh and I kind of agree with Danyl, at least in so far as that there is a perception that our left pisses money away. Whether it is actually true that they do it more than the right is another matter.
Ultimately the problem is actually much less about how much money we piss away, and more about how little we earn. And in that arena I tend to agree with you, there is a bizarrely uniform belief that government expenditure to actually generate wealth is a terrible idea. I personally think Muldoon again has a lot to answer for there, and the wild fluctuation of policy shortly after his fall led us to this peculiar position in which a 'liberal' left finds itself having to justify the massive sale of assets in the 80s as though it was fat to be trimmed, when our near bankruptcy had little to do with that.
It's a Kiwi quirk - I never encountered any such thing in Australia. The left and right seem further apart over there, more clearly defined, more rigid, much more aligned around families and regions. I don't think this is a good thing, particularly because it puts the economic aspect of the left-right divide as the main course on the menu every time, and very little progress is ever made by politics that is focused more on social issues. The overall effect is a country that is sometimes to the left of us on economic issues, but never, ever on social ones. The amazing thing is they don't even know it.
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I want to expand public services, not reduce them.
But if something is going to be paid from the public purse, it has to have some justification for it. I'm in favour of funding of Maori TV, that's easy. The funding for the new digital TVNZ channels, yup.
A concert station that the private market won't provide? OK, I'll buy that. Ad-free concert music? How is that important to the nation?
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So your argument is "it wouldn't save much, so it's not worth doing"?
It's a cost-benefit argument. What do you lose for a relatively modest saving in the scheme of things?
I think that report assumes "no advertising". Clearly if you opened up the radio station to advertising or sponsorship, there's money to be earned.
If you're talking about National, I think you underestimate the implications of such an action.
On one hand, it would wreck the ability of the RNZ to deliver extended programmes and interviews. It's almost impossible to conduct an interview of longer than five minutes on mainstream commercial radio. The ability to air important programmes for minority audiences would pretty much disappear -- see TVNZ for an example.
On the other, the entry of a publicly-owned station with half a million listeners to the commercial advertising market would be a disaster for existing private commercial broadcasters.
Holmes, Hosking and Marcus Lush have all vented about RNZ without apparently thinking about the impact that a commercial RNZ might have on their pay packets.
If you're only talking about Concert FM, you have to think about how much sponsorship money there really is in that sector, and who -- particularly in the arts -- would miss out if Concert did win meaningful sponsorship. It would have a significant impact.
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US remake [of] The Wicker Man
Great. Thanks a flippin' bunch for bringing that particular repressed memory back to the surface.
If anyone needs me, I'll me in the corner rocking and humming to myself.
Eagle vs. Shark...I truly wanted to like it.
coughwholesaleripoffofNapoleonDynamitecough.
I wonder if this is fallout from the historical accident in which New Zealand's liberal Left and neoconservative Right were the same people for a few topsy-turvy years...
And down here in Rand-McNally, people wear shoes on their feet, and hamburgers eat people?
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Ad free night classes, national parks, libraries, water, home care for elderly citizens
How are they important to the nation? As Helen C said recently, some things are more important than money.
I'm still waiting for somebody to convince me that anything needs doing at all. I want to expand public services, not reduce them. It seems that we have run out of money, except for tax cuts and funding private schools.
Well said, Giovanni.
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I guess that was the motivation for excluding RNZ from the highly dubious radio surveys, or sticking them in an "Other" category.
Really, Geoff? My understanding is that RNZ has consistently declined to participate in those "highly dubious radio surveys", but far be it from me to disturb the vast right wing/corporate conspiracy narrative.
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I don't buy the argument that the market should support everything that moves. The NZSO is a mixture of govt funding and private funding and ticket sales. Maori TV sells advertising and receives govt funding. They seem to me to be as important to NZ as Concert, yet it's fully funded?
And as a result the NZSO has suffered really badly from the recession. This season they've reduced the amount of works for large forces (ie. only one concert with two harps I understand) and effectively scrapped two subscription concerts. The volume of contemporary music and in particular New Zealand music is way down on last year outside of the annual Made in New Zealand concert. Somebody mentioned the Mahler concert at the Festival earlier - the last I heard, the Festival organisers were demanding that Mahler's reduced orchestral version be used, which is a slap in the face for the people who paid (too much) money to go see it.
Personally, I'd like Concert to focus more attention on sonic art (rather than confining it to Sound Lounge), which is very much an international music. It's creative, involving and relatively free of cultural baggage; and it also opens the door to some of the more 'arty' electronica.
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A concert station that the private market won't provide? OK, I'll buy that. Ad-free concert music? How is that important to the nation?
Because we need commercial free spaces, and we have precious few left. Because it's hard to sneak ads into Onegin. Because it would take sponsorship money away from other places where it's currently spent. Because we don't need to do it. Because it's the thin end of the wedge into opening RNZ proper to sponsorship, and nobody wants that. But none of those reasons bother me as much as how we waltzed into having this conversation, happily conceding a huge amount of ground to the privatisers of every single last fucking thing.
Grarrrr!! Tiso smash!
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Bravo, Dottore.
You have my vote.
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complaints that the same music available for free on the internet is of lower quality
Danyl, are you saying that audio quality doesn't matter in the dissemination of music (of whatever genre)?
And that assumes that everyone has access to good broadband. Good luck if you live in a rural area.
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But none of those reasons bother me as much as how we waltzed into having this conversation, happily conceding a huge amount of ground to the privatisers of every single last fucking thing.
Refusing to make an argument beyond "just because, you stinking Visigoths" isn't a concession, it's deciding that even getting on the field of battle is beneath your dignity.
Now if you'd excuse me, there's a cosy looking foxhole over there and an atheist who needs a cuddle...
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coughwholesaleripoffofNapoleonDynamitecough
And there's another movie I didn't like! (Apart from the opening credits.)
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how we waltzed into having this conversation, happily conceding a huge amount of ground to the privatisers
Need way better articulation of the positive value of public goods. Since the election, people seem to have forgotten the arguments they perhaps didn't need so much for the previous nine years.
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