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Contents
Abstracts
A clever little country?
Mary Griffiths and Geoff Lealand
Our editorial for this special issue of MIA is a contribution to what we hope will, in future, be a more lively and informed dialogue across both the New Zealand and Australian sides of the ‘ditch’.
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Regions and runaways: Film assistance in New Zealand and British Columbia, 1999–2005
David Newman
The film and television production industry is significant in both New Zealand and British Columbia. Governments in both localities provide substantial support for the industry through government agencies and tax incentives. This study reviews the effectiveness and success of the New Zealand Film Commission and BC Film in meeting their respective mandates and strategic goals over the last five years. The scope and success of government tax incentives in attracting and encouraging production in both localities are reviewed, with an analysis undertaken of the results. The paper concludes that the greater cultural focus by the New Zealand government compared with that of British Columbia has resulted in a stronger track record of critically acclaimed and commercially successful films from New Zealand, with a more mixed record from the service-oriented film economy of British Columbia.
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What difference does a museum make? Te Papa’s contribution to the New Zealand economy
Lorna Kaino
Te Papa museum opened in Wellington, New Zealand in 1998. This paper examines its impact on economic growth in Wellington and New Zealand. It argues that Te Papa’s outstanding achievements in visitation numbers and reception have been pivotal to the transformation of Wellington into an attractive tourist, leisure and working destination. Te Papa’s exogenous wealth has been considerably boosted by a high overseas visitation rate. In addition, its popular, accessible exhibition programs, augmented by extensive education and outreach programs to arts and education institutions, business people and the general public, have provided a cultural milieu that attracts both arts and business practitioners to Wellington.
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Public broadcasting in the digital age: Issues for television in New Zealand
Paul Norris
New Zealand has a unique model of public broadcasting for television. The state broadcaster is almost totally commercial, although since 2003 it has been given a charter and some limited public funding. A state agency, NZ On Air, administers funding contestable between national broadcasters for public broadcasting, meaning in essence local (national) content in the threatened genres of drama, documentary, children’s and minority programs. But this system is under challenge from the rise of multi-channel and the transition to digital. Audiences are fragmenting and the combined impact of broadband, the PVR and VOD threaten the notion of the broadcast schedule and the viability of commercial free-to-air television itself. The concluding section of this paper examines issues for the New Zealand model in adapting to the digital challenge, and looks at the criteria on which the model’s success or failure may be judged.
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A sting in the tale: Quirky New Zealand films
Hester Joyce
New Zealand films face the dual pressures of succeeding internationally while satisfying the cultural criteria imposed by state funding agencies. In an attempt to reach larger audiences, one response has been to adopt Hollywood models of storytelling. The genre constraints, goal-oriented protagonist and restorative narrative structure that these models demand are at odds with the specifics implied by the term ‘a New Zealand film’. Local filmmakers favour the contrary elements of open-ended narratives, eccentric protagonists and paradoxical endings. This paper compares the structural elements of four New Zealand films — Smash Palace (Roger Donaldson, 1981), Utu (Geoff Murphy, 1982), Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994) and Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2003) — and explores the innovative and sometimes unconventional narrative solutions reached by filmmakers while negotiating a Hollywood paradigm within a local context.
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Need to localise in New Zealand? Nickelodeon and the institutional logics of ‘media superpowers’
Katalin Lustyik
Following the call for studies that ‘turn away from speculative theory and argument-by-anecdote towards a more empirical consideration of media institutions as one of the contested interfaces between national and global forces’ (Curtin, 2005: 159), this paper investigates the institutional logics of Nickelodeon in the Asia-Pacific region. Focusing on Nickelodeon’s operations in New Zealand can provide a particularly revealing case study in the dynamics of media globalisation and the ‘globalisation/fragmentation dialectic’ that defines the existence of media conglomerations today. The paper concludes that — especially when compared to Australia — Nickelodeon in New Zealand represents a revealing case which underscores the domination of the ‘global’ in the globalisation/fragmentation dialectic. It is particularly ironic that Nickelodeon, among global media companies, distinguishes itself as a promoter of customisation, and that the future of pay and digital television in New Zealand is primarily shaped by politicians who have the tendency to ‘believe that only the market has the necessary understanding’ (Horrocks, 2004: 66).
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Extreme makeover: The recurring motif of New Zealand broadcasting policy
Mary Debrett
Broadcasting policy in New Zealand has been described as ‘political football’ (Gregory, 1985: 98). Predating the Lange Labour government’s radical deregulation of 1989, this metaphor reflects routine restructuring and political disregard for the potential cultural and social merits of state-owned broadcasting. Pragmatic change, masquerading as reform, has left the public increasingly underserved: from the ‘Clayton’s’ solution of the monopoly era, non-commercial days, to the radical transformation into a ‘cash cow’ in the 1990s, to the Clark Labour government’s CROC — a chartered public service broadcaster with a continuing remit to be profitable. This article explores, for an international audience, the combination of factors — historical predisposition, economics and political ideology — that has denied the New Zealand public a mainstream, non-commercial television service and, with reference to the changing nature of broadcasting, discusses the continuing importance of such a model.
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Desultory dividends: The politics of funding the TVNZ charter
Peter A. Thompson
The introduction of the TVNZ charter legislation in 2003 restructured the broadcaster from a state-owned enterprise (SEO) to a Crown-owned company (CROC). TVNZ was given a charter involving a dual remit obliging the delivery of extensive public service functions while maintaining commercial performance. The government also decided to directly fund charter initiatives through the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, and TVNZ anticipated that the Treasury would forego any expectations of continued dividend payments. However, in 2004 TVNZ paid a $37.6 million dividend to the Treasury — double the amount it received from the Ministry of Culture and Heritage. Despite charter requirements, TVNZ remains disproportionately dependent on commercial revenue to fund programming initiatives. Drawing on original interviews with TVNZ and ministerial officials, and using the TVNZ charter as a case study, this paper explores how different institutional agents can engage with politicaleconomic structures in the negotiation of broadcasting policy and funding mechanisms.
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Empty heartland: The absent regions on New Zealand television
Susan Fountaine, Margie Comrie and Christine Cheyne
Each night, two-thirds of New Zealanders tune into prime-time national news on free-to-air channels TV One and TV3. This paper argues, however, that viewers get a very limited view of their nation on the box. While the archetypal Kiwi identity reflects ties to ‘the land’ and accompanying values of self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, television news is preoccupied with urban happenings, and tells heartland stories from a city perspective. Content analysis shows overseas stories are a third of network news, and well over half of the rest comes from Auckland and Wellington. Regional coverage is largely restricted to crime or human interest, and there is an absence of rural news. Since 1990, New Zealanders have had no regional news programs to fill these gaps. The government has, until recently, reneged on funding promises for local television, relying instead on TVNZ’s charter objective to ‘reflect the regions to the nation’. The paper considers the success of this policy, and its implications for the heartland and national identity.
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Starting Aboriginal broadcasting: Whitefella business
Peter Westerway
Officials in the Australian Public Service often wield substantial influence on policy-making, yet their work is normally hidden from public view. This case study of the process involved in developing an Aboriginal broadcasting policy after the 1967 referendum reveals conflict between two incompatible paradigms: assimilation (Aboriginal affairs) and diversity of choice (broadcasting). This conflict, together with official reluctance to truly consult with relevant Aboriginal communities and misunderstandings over historically and culturally specific concepts such as country, tribe, clan, community and resident, eventually led to policy failure. Since community control was not considered as an option, Aboriginal broadcasting obstinately remained whitefella business.
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Localism and networking: A radio news case study
Beate Josephi, Gail Phillips and Angela Businoska
The Broadcasting Services Act 1992 ushered in a new hands-off approach by government which, in the case of radio, permitted commercial broadcasters to double their investments in individual markets through the two-station policy while removing any onerous commitments to local content. Since then, there has been concern about the flow-on effect this may have had, with Peter Collingwood’s 1997 study of commercial radio confirming that levels of local content were reducing as levels of networked content were increasing. He bemoaned the fact that a by-product of the self-regulatory regime was a reduction in the amount of publicly available information against which performance could be gauged. Since 1992, only one detailed study of local radio news has been done, Graeme Turner’s 1996 examination of radio and television news in the Brisbane market. Now a parallel study has been conducted in Perth, giving an insight into localism and networking six years later.
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DVD time: Temporality, audience engagement and the new TV culture of digital video
Rob Cover
DVD use and the reported purchase of DVD players have grown markedly in recent years, and in 2002 Lyall Johnson claimed this was growing at the rate of 80 per cent annually. As a digital narrative format, it provides a means of viewing televisual products alternative to broadcast traditions and, significantly, beyond the ‘timeshifted’ video cassette in its analogue and serial format. From a perspective which considers the aesthetics of television production and spectatorship through new digital forms of dissemination, DVD has arguably motivated a style of viewing that sponsors the longer narrative arc, provides greater control to the viewer in terms of how the program is watched, its frequency and the sequence in which a series is viewed, and alters the temporality of television viewing in terms of shifting control of the viewing experience away from a centre–periphery broadcast network to the consumer, audience member or user.
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REVIEWS
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