Neil Sands
The government will scrap the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA), Media & Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith announced on Wednesday, saying the regulator’s role “makes no sense” in the modern media landscape.
Minister Paul Goldsmith
Goldsmith said media outlets currently overseen by the BSA will move to self-regulation with the Media Council, which already scrutinises print and text-based online media.
“I’m confident that greater industry self-regulation is the most practical way to level the playing field across platforms, and can provide an appropriate level of oversight to maintain ethical journalistic standards and audience trust,” he said.
The decision comes after the BSA stirred controversy by unilaterally deciding it had jurisdiction over online broadcasting in New Zealand after receiving a complaint about Sean Plunket’s internet radio outlet The Platform.
The BSA’s move, widely seen as a bid to stay relevant in an era when over-the-air broadcasting to mass audiences has been overtaken by on-demand streaming content, prompted accusations of regulatory overreach.
Goldsmith said the BSA, established in 1989, was “designed for a broadcasting environment that is rapidly disappearing”.
“Today, audiences move seamlessly between traditional broadcasting, on‑demand services, podcasts and online platforms – yet only a small portion of that content is subject to the BSA’s regulatory oversight. It doesn’t make sense,” he said.
“The current framework can create inconsistencies and unfair outcomes for media providers, with similar content treated differently depending on whether it is broadcast live or accessed on demand.”
‘Taste police’
Just last week, BSA chief executive Stacey Wood outlined the difficulties the regulator faces trying to define what content falls within its remit.
“Broadly, if people are choosing episodes from a menu, it’s probably out [but] if people are tuning in, or listening, or watching whatever’s on, it’s probably in,” she told a parliamentary select committee.
Highlighting the inconsistencies this approach created, Wood said this meant that if a television station put a programme on its video-on-demand channel but ran a promotion for it on its free-to-air channel, the BSA could accept complaints only about the promotion, not the programme itself.
The BSA’s push to regulate online broadcasters applied only to New Zealand-based content. It conceded it could do nothing about overseas-based platforms such as Netflix, YouTube or Disney+ which stream into New Zealand households.
Responding to Goldsmith’s announcement on Wednesday, Wood said the BSA had been saying for 15 years that the current regime was no effective.
She said the BSA’s main interest was ensuring there was a regulator people could turn to if they felt public standards had been breached.
“It has never been about protecting our existing operating model, and it was clear any future regulator would need to look different to the existing BSA,” she said. “It has always been for lawmakers to decide if the authority plays a role in any future regulatory setup.”
Plunket said the announcement would make no difference to The Platform’s output.
“We weren’t really interested in what the BSA was saying anyway. It won’t change anything editorially,” he told Stuff. “But it is a victory for free speech, and it is victory for people who want to say what they want on the internet.”
ACT MP Laura McClure, who last year lodged a private member’s bill to abolish the BSA, welcomed the announcement.
“We don’t need a taxpayer-funded taste police in Wellington deciding what people are allowed to hear,” she said.
“We already have laws for real harm like defamation and incitement. What we don’t need is millions in public money, plus levies on struggling media outlets, funding an outdated bureaucracy that was trying to control the modern media landscape.”
Goldsmith said legislation to repeal provisions relating to the BSA would be drafted “in the coming months” and the regulator would continue until it was passed into law.
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