Labour says ‘hands off Radio NZ’

Written By: - Date published: 12:29 pm, March 5th, 2010 - 5 comments
Categories: broadcasting - Tags:

The campaign to save Radio New Zealand from funding cuts and commercialisation is going well. Well attended rallies have been held in Wellington, Auckland, and Christchurch. The Facebook group, which now has 17,800 members and is close to overtaking the John Key supporters’ group, has attracted a lot of media attention.

Now Labour have put their weight behind the campaign. Broadcasting spokesman Brendon Burns has launched a campaign site – www.handsoffradionz.co.nz with a thousand names on the e-petition already – and it looks like this is going to be another fruitful issue to hammer the government over in months to come.

Radio NZ is a special and extremely valuable institution. It is our only major broadcaster that operates independent of commercial constraints and that’s why no other news outlet comes close in terms of the depth and quality of news coverage.

We can’t afford to lose this unique asset to miserly funding cuts and commercialisation.

5 comments on “Labour says ‘hands off Radio NZ’ ”

  1. Nick C 1

    When did Radio NZ get its funding cut?

    • Lanthanide 1.1

      National is proposing that Radio NZ’s budget will not be increased, which is a cut in real terms due to inflation.

      I am not sure if they are also talking about actually reducing the $ figure outright or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me – they cut $2.4M off a prisoner rehabilitation programme after all, so they’re not above making petty cuts for trifling amounts of money, no matter how well that money was being spent.

  2. sean14 2

    Wouldn’t the campaign to save Radio New Zealand from a nil funding increase be a more accurate way to start the first paragraph?

The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
The site will be off line for some hours.