We do not have a housing crisis. The housing market works perfectly for those it was designed to serve. Landlords are now protesting because the precarious position of renters has (finally) been acknowledged.
But who knows how long it will it take before the talk ends and the watered down action begins? And even then if the result resembles the government’s affordable housing fiasco where do we go from there? But we are not alone.
Credit: ‘New Zealand Television – the first 25 years’, by Robert Boyd-Bell
The early television days were staffed by competent, experienced staff with mainly radio experience coping with second hand BBC equipment in small make shift studios with tape, lighting and telecine (film) operators in cramped uncomfortable cupboards/offices. Staff like Barry Warner, Colin Harrison, Geoff Eady, Robyn Petrie, Ian Hill, Stuart Murray and Russ Lambert and Bob Smith. We owe them so much.
First I must declare that I’m involved with Better Public Media, so it is very apparent what I want from television in New Zealand.
But I also want more for other sectors of the media, for I have drifted away from mainstream (linear, scheduled) television and have joined the Netflix generation. When I drift back to Television New Zealand or TV3, these channels seem like foreign places, where narratives are jarringly interrupted by extended breaks of increasingly banal adverts.
Standing on the fourth-floor balcony of Tūranga, Christchurch’s recently opened library sited on Cathedral Square, I gazed down onto the sagging ruin that is the post-earthquake Christchurch Cathedral. From this angle the decision to restore makes even less sense than it did three years ago when I viewed the wreckage from behind a ground level wire-mesh safety fence.
The Lost Generation
‘There’s a generation of Kiwis who have grown up not knowing what public service television is’, says the Better Public Media Trust on its website. And it goes on to list the programming casualties lost in the shifting battlefields of broadcasting over the past 50 years:
Rainbow Tick is a business, like the halal certification business, it gives organisations a tick for behaving in the manner the certifier approves. The Muslim Islamic Council provides certification to businesses that kill their animals with a single cut, that are thoroughly bled, and have not come into contact with animals (pork especially) that have been stunned before being slaughtered.
When you land at an international airport it’s as if you’re still in the one you left. What they also have in common is a building programme that’s been going on for decades with no end in sight. Airports are goldmines. Which is why Queenstown Airport Corporation has Wanaka in its sights and Auckland is eyeing up Whenuapai.
Why would anyone think I’d vote for them if they give me a leaflet I don’t want! Look – it says ‘NO CIRCULARS’!” I consider explaining that local body election leaflets are actually not ‘circulars’, or indeed, advertising at all. They are instead an important part of the democratic process. But I fear a bureaucratic distinction will be lost on this vehement elderly woman intent on keeping her letter box clear of bumf, and for that matter, on most others whose letterboxes are firmly labelled as to what can and cannot be posted within.
TVOne News led with it. At first glance The New Zealand Herald looks like it did too. Last month, the newspaper had just two words on its front page: IT’S ON! Which we already knew so it hardly qualified as news.
Both media outlets were covering the same story, the Rugby World Cup. Thing is the Herald wasn’t – well, not exactly. The front page,usually the pride of newspapers, was a wrap-around. At its bottom was a line which proudly proclaimed that this was an ad for the chain store Harvey Norman… The real Granny Herald hid inside, shamed perhaps by its commercial needs.