This weeks Waatea news column – What is going on at Radio NZ?

1. “It demands upon TVNZ and RNZ to counter much of the free market right wing propaganda and petty racism that bogs us down as a nation, and it requires them to generate the space where those voices, ideas and kaupapa can be platformed…”

   Yes Martyn, My response to the question posed above;

   ONE WORD EXPLAINS WHY WE DO NOT HAVE THIS FREE SPEECH; – =Joyce.

   Steven Joyce is behind all the media events in this country and pulls all the strings very much in a dictatorial manner akin to his apparent idol Joseph Goebbels it seems.

   So we need to place him and his nasty club under the spotlight on your show.

   Beginning with a wrap on the history of Joyce’s rise to media mogul from his beginning as a small south Island radio station operator, and now sits on the board of a major network he sold himself and before he as a Government Minister arranged a $25 million Government grant to expand his media works company firstly.

   Now he controls the agency he setup that controls the media including TVNZ/RFNZ. and mostly other major agencies in NZ as the extravagant agency noted as MBIE.

   EXPOSURE TIME MARTYN for him, not just as the dildo issue though.

   Here’s a interview with Joyce in 2011 by Paul Homes that should kick the ball off Martyn.

   http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1104/S00225/paul-holmes-interviews-tertiary-minister-steven-joyce.htm
   PAUL Yes, the money that the government’s essentially lent to MediaWorks. Treasury…

   MR JOYCE I’m so surprised you brought that up, Paul!

   PAUL (laughs) Treasury advised you that MediaWorks could survive without that accommodation.

   MR JOYCE Well, first of all, it’s not money lent. It’s a deferred payment scheme. It has to be represented as a loan in the books. They did not get a single dollar from the government.

   PAUL No, no, but essentially it’s a loan, isn’t it? I mean they could have… If they were having trouble, you know, paying what they had to for those frequencies, why could MediaWorks not have gone to a bank? Why does the taxpayer have to be essentially the bank?

   MR JOYCE Well, the interesting situation there is we said, “We’re only going to do this if it’s done on a commercial basis.” Effectively, they’re going to pay 11½% interest for the deferred-payment system. We said that to all broadcasters. A number of them took it up. There were others that were looking at it and decided not to take it up, including people like Radio Rhema and the Radio Network.

   PAUL Radio Network didn’t take it up, did they?

   MR JOYCE That’s right. But, look, the scheme was very simple, and the government did a lot of things in 2009 to defer payments owed to the government for various things, to ensure that people kept their jobs, including, for example, in company tax – things like provisional tax payments. We softened the requirements there to ensure that people could stay in jobs. Now, the flip of this – if we hadn’t done it, if we hadn’t actually taken this scheme and half the radio broadcasting industry had gone broke, and then it had come out that the government had been offered and opportunity to save some jobs by providing a five-year deferred payment with full interest, and we hadn’t done it, they’d say, “You heartless, heartless government.”

   PAUL Well, Minister, that’s the market, isn’t it? Why not let MediaWorks sort it out? Why not let MediaWorks try to…?

   MR JOYCE Why not let all the broadcasters…? The unusual part about
   this was…
   PAUL Well, only MediaWorks took it up. Could I just say, though…?

   MR JOYCE No, no, hang on one second. Right at the middle of the global financial crisis, right. Right at the middle of it, we were requiring the radio industry, just by sheer luck of confluence of circumstances, to pay a massive amount, by their standards in terms of their turnover – which they had agreed to — $90 million-odd for frequencies for the next 20 years. And somebody would say it would be a pretty heartless and ideological government that couldn’t actually have offered a deferred-payment scheme with commercial rates of interest over the next five years to get them over that hump and keep people in jobs, Paul.

   PAUL Can’t you see how bad it looks that you essentially bailed out the company you founded? It looks to people like crony capitalism.

   MR JOYCE Well, that’s just rubbish. I hadn’t been anything to do with them for 10 years. It’s a bit like saying that Annette King couldn’t be the Minister of Health because she’d been a dentist in a past life or Trevor Mallard couldn’t be the Minister of Education because he’d been a teacher in a past life. I mean, for goodness sake, it’s 10 years since I was involved in that company.

   PAUL Minister, I thank you very much indeed for your time.

   © Scoop Media

2. I would like to know what is going on with our media as a whole. We used to get Q+A on TVNZ and The Nation on TV3, there has been NONE at all so far this year, does anybody know, whether these remnants of “current affairs” shows have now also been abolished or not?

   I cannot believe what is going on in New Zealand, there is NIL political discussion and debate on any media it seems, zilch, nada, nil that I note. That is apart from the odd short interview on RNZ, forget Paul Henry and his clowns, and forget Breakfast, same as Hosking and muppets.

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