Brendon Burns

20 August 2009 - The cabinet has ignored advice from TVNZ chair Sir John Anderson to hold a review of broadcasting competition issues, even though Sir John said the Government's own broadband policies demanded such a review, says Labour broadcasting spokesperson Brendon Burns.

Brendon Burns said papers released to him under the Official Information Act show Sir John advised Broadcasting Minister Jonathan Coleman in January that the Government should act on behalf of consumers.

In his advice, Sir John said any investor in the Government's planned broadband fibre-to-the-home networks would place considerable value on using these to offer consumers "triple play" - phone, Internet and pay TV packages. Sir John wrote: 'Critical to this is a regime that prevents any one player closing up access to content providers of a network via exclusive arrangements, an area that the competition study will no doubt pay particular attention to.'

Brendon Burns said Sir John advised Dr Coleman that a review of competition in broadcasting would address important and timely questions about New Zealand's market structure and the state of competition in broadcasting markets.

The TVNZ chair was unaware of any such previous study which was surprising given broadcasting's importance to New Zealand's identity and economy, and said the deregulation of telecommunications had shown how conditions for competition can often be significantly improved for the benefit of consumers. Brendon Burns said the Government had announced in April, however, it would not review competition issues in broadcasting --- thus ignoring Sir John, one of our business leaders, and a range of other advice from the industry and officials.

"The decision-maker here is not Dr Coleman but Communications Minister Stephen Joyce who is shaped by his free-booting commercial radio background. Mr Joyce and Dr Coleman pretend to be 'hands-off' but in fact are gripping the steering wheel and driving by the rear-view mirror.

They fail to acknowledge Sir John's advice that broadcasting will change very rapidly once homes have real broadband and receive converging streams of digital media content.

"Getting that environment right for true competition and ensuring it delivers strong New Zealand content is a critical task but the Government is ignoring the issues that its own broadband policies are creating," said Brendon Burns.