A few thoughts on that Concert FM brouhaha

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, March 5.)

I’m not a Concert FM listener, but my father was. He was no activist; I don’t recall him ever expressing a political opinion about anything. But for years he conducted a one-man letter-writing campaign urging that the Concert Programme, as it was then called, be broadcast in Hawke’s Bay.

It may have come as a shock to the broadcasting bureaucrats that there was someone in Waipukurau who wanted to hear Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and Elgar’s Cello Concerto as played by Jacqueline du Pre. They possibly assumed that the interests of people in the provincial heartland didn’t extend beyond the Ranfurly Shield and crossbreed wool prices.

Dad wasn’t just a classical music aficionado. Being an engineer, he understood the technical issues involved in extending the Concert Programme’s reach and wasn’t easily brushed off by arguments that it was too difficult. He finally got his wish only a couple of years before he died.

Naturally, I thought about him when RNZ announced its now-superseded plan to ditch Concert FM.  Notwithstanding Dad’s devotion to the Concert Programme, I didn’t care one way or the other. But the resulting stoush was interesting because of what it said about contemporary New Zealand political dynamics.

For RNZ and its political masters, it was a sharp lesson in who not to upset. Concert FM listeners may represent only a tiny proportion of the population, but they are not people a Labour-led government can afford to get offside with.

They tend to be the very people Labour depends on most for public support – high-profile people in the arts, academia and the media. And they know exactly which buttons to push to get their way.

But the Concert FM fiasco, and the rapid U-turn it prompted, highlighted something else. It showed that the people who exert most influence on modern Labour are not the blue-collar battlers who historically formed the core of the party’s support.

Labour is now the party of the affluent urban elite – the type of people who attend film festivals, NZSO concerts and book readings. I bet there weren’t a lot of checkout operators and truck drivers at the pro-Concert FM demonstration outside Parliament.

It’s interesting to contrast the government’s sensitivity to the uproar over Concert FM with its indifference to the concerns of gun owners, who object to their rights being eroded on the bogus pretext that it will reduce the risk of another Christchurch mosque massacre.

It couldn’t be clearer who Labour identifies with – and it’s not people who wear Swanndri shirts and drive utes, who in Norman Kirk’s time would have been counted among the party’s natural constituency. 

There’s one other point worth making about the Concert FM furore. Some commentators asked whether the public money lavished on Concert FM was justified, given that it caters to a small audience. But doesn’t the whole of RNZ exist for the taxpayer-funded gratification of a minority?

The state broadcaster employs a lot of talented, dedicated people and does some things very well. But no one can pretend that it caters to the broad tastes and interests of mainstream New Zealand, and it certainly doesn’t accurately reflect mainstream political values as indicated by voting patterns.

Rather, RNZ uncritically embraces voguish leftist causes and can be relied on to provide a platform for anyone attacking what were once called establishment values.  

Turn on RNZ National at random and you’re likely to hear someone expounding a fashionably woke position on issues such as climate change, race and gender politics. They go unchallenged. RNZ is a vast left-wing echo-chamber. Like many public broadcasting organisations overseas, it is a self-perpetuating ideological monoculture.

As a result, an enormous number of New Zealanders simply never listen. As far as they're concerned, RNZ might as well not exist. They don’t feel it’s theirs, despite the fact that their taxes fund it. RNZ doesn’t feel like my radio station either, although for many years I was an habitual listener.  

Of course RNZ can point to a high level of listener satisfaction, but that’s because it has narrowed its audience down to a segment of the population that applauds its “progressive” content.

Do I hear New Zealand in its totality reflected on RNZ? Absolutely not. I get a much wider and more complete picture listening to NewstalkZB or Magic Talk. But the price of hearing the diverse opinions of rank-and-file New Zealanders is that you also have to listen to intrusive, repetitive commercials. Only RNZ listeners have the privilege of getting their radio content free of advertising.

Forget the howls of outrage from Concert FM’s entitled listeners; the much bigger issue, which everyone ignores, is RNZ’s failure to fulfil its statutory obligations to the country at large.