Feature
For the public good
by Mark Revington
Incoming Radio New Zealand boss Peter Cavanagh faces one challenge above all – to tune more listeners in to the state broadcaster’s already well-regarded but often poorly packaged and under-promoted programmes.
Radio New Zealand’s board members must have rubbed their hands in collective glee when Peter Cavanagh hove into view as a potential successor for Sharon Crosbie. Affable, urbane, regarded as a champion of public broadcasting across the Tasman and a reputation for being popular with staff.
Evidently, they rushed him off the plane and into meetings so fast that he didn’t even have time to listen to an RNZ programme. He knows of New Zealand’s public broadcaster by reputation – excellent, according to him – rather than experience.
Cavanagh starts this week, after Crosbie agreed to step down a month early so that he wouldn’t be confronting empty desks in the New Year when many staff will be on holiday. Don’t expect immediate dramatic changes. He has a simple philosophy. RNZ’s news must be timely, accurate and sought after, its programmes must reflect the society it serves and it should set an agenda for thought-provoking, edgy, intelligent programming.
There’s nothing magical in that prescription. It’s enshrined in the charter, which says the broadcaster must “provide innovative, comprehensive and independent broadcasting services of a high standard”. The argument is about how the broadcaster achieves it. And that last phrase may send shivers down the spines of RNZ’s more conservative loyal listeners, and surprise those who regard the broadcaster as a staid old cardigan with holes in the elbows.
Public broadcasters must take risks, says Cavanagh. It’s incumbent on them to develop new programmes and new audiences, unrestrained as they are by the expectations of shareholders.
“I think SBS [public broadcaster Special Broadcasting Services] was regarded as being at the cutting edge of Australian TV,” says Cavanagh, who was head of television at SBS. “It was the market leader in a whole range of programmes. It was seen as a risk-taking organisation with a reputation as innovative and intelligent.” In contrast, commercial broadcasters worldwide have become increasingly risk-averse. “No one wants to take a risk with a product that hasn’t been tried. Public broadcasters have an obligation to take risks and often they will see their good ideas being copied by commercial broadcasters. It’s about encouraging a culture where you have to be prepared to try some things that won’t work.”
His reputation at SBS, a broadcaster that draws 85 percent of its funding from the state and is allowed five minutes of advertising an hour, was that of an astute manager responsible for healthy audiences and interesting programming. He presided over the most successful five years in the broadcaster’s history and doubled local content.
“Rising ratings, clever ideas and cult status. Surely, this can’t be SBS? But it is,” said the Sun Herald in 2002, when SBS increased its audience by 23% to reach 7.6 million people a week.
Cavanagh left last year, reportedly unhappy at SBS’s creep towards commercialism and a reshuffle that stripped him of some power. On his last day, so the story goes, staff gathered at his office door to give him some sort of ovation. Since then, he hasn’t been in a hurry to find a new job.
Cavanagh began his career as a cadet with the ABC, and spent 12 years there, the last six as senior political reporter. He taught journalism in the UK for a while and then moved to Australian Capital Television (now known as Southern Cross), producer of all that Aussie drama on our screens, where he spent five years as managing director before leaving to whip the SBS news division into shape.
“I’m a public broadcaster born and bred and first and foremost I was looking for opportunities in public broadcasting. That’s a narrow field worldwide, but I was prepared to bide my time. Radio New Zealand offers exactly what I was looking for.”
Yes. Popular, passionate about the role of public broadcasting in society and – get this – prepared to accept tight budgets. When Cavanagh took over as SBS head of news and current affairs in 1996, he inherited a department facing massive budget cuts and rife with the sort of staff disputes triggered by those pressures.
The solution? “I’m a great believer that if you analyse carefully what you do and how you do it, there are usually ways of freeing up resources so that you are able to live within tight budget restraints and you are able to deliver a good product and increase quality. Over the next couple of years at SBS, we expanded the output with only marginally increased resources, and we more than doubled the number of people who used SBS’s World Service.”
You can imagine how that played to the Radio New Zealand board, although RNZ budgets are getting a top-up with the government’s announcement that funding will increase from $22.4 million to $25.046 million a year, plus $3.39 million to establish FM services – welcome news after a decade of cuts and uncertainty.
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