September 25, 2026

Scrapping the BSA against official advice is deregulation by slogan

A professional in a TV broadcast control room with multiple screens and equipment.

The coalition has spent two years preaching regulatory discipline. Then it scrapped the Broadcasting Standards Authority in a way that fails its own tests. According to NZ Herald’s Media Insider, officials favoured reform over abolition. They also found the repeal legislation inconsistent with three principles of the Regulatory Standards Act: consultation, cost-benefit analysis and the most-effective-response test.

That is the problem here. The Government is not wrong that broadcasting rules need fixing. It is wrong about how it chose to fix them.

The case for change was never in dispute

The 1989 Broadcasting Act regulates a world of linear TV and radio schedules. It does not cleanly cover streaming, on-demand or online content, and the BSA itself has said so for years. Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith said in May that regulatory settings “have not kept up” and that the BSA was built for a broadcasting environment that is “rapidly disappearing”. On that, he is right.

But officials had already mapped out a solution. The Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s 2024 interim regulatory impact statement recommended a platform-neutral model covering all professional media. Under it, a regulator would work with industry bodies and keep a residual complaints function. A February 2025 Cabinet paper confirmed that direction. In the consultation that followed, 62% of 117 submissions supported modernisation and 23% opposed it.

That was a sensible, pro-business reform path. It offered one rulebook across platforms and ended the anomaly where TVNZ is regulated but its streaming rivals are not.

One ruling changed the plan

The shift came after the BSA asserted jurisdiction over Sean Plunket’s online outlet The Platform. In August it upheld two complaints against the outlet but imposed no penalties, and coalition parties reacted by speeding up abolition. The Spinoff noted in May that outlets like The Platform were not regulated by the BSA before this dispute and will not be regulated after abolition either.

The ministry’s own accountability statement is blunt. It says net costs are “likely to slightly outweigh the net benefits”. It also flags the long-term cost of removing “an enforceable complaints avenue and media content standards that support fairness and accuracy”. A government that legislated to make regulators justify their rules should hold itself to the same standard when it removes them.

A watchdog costing less than a mid-sized law firm

This is not a bloated agency. In 2023/24 the BSA ran on $1.732 million in revenue, with about $0.75m of that coming from an industry levy. In its 2025 annual report, the BSA recorded formal complaints below 100 for the first time since 1990/91. Over three years it has upheld only 20 of 311 decisions, and none of them put a broadcaster off air or out of business.

Scrapping a cheap, low-intervention regulator produces a small fiscal saving. The real question is what replaces it.

What broadcasters and brands inherit

Goldsmith says the Media Council should become “the primary regulator for journalism”. Media law expert Steven Price points out that the council reportedly has one staff member and no government funding, yet would take on “another hundred plus complaints a year”. He also says its principles are “much more vague, and its decisions are wafflier”. According to RNZ’s Mediawatch, the council upholds complaints two to three times more often than the BSA did and offers no appeal. BSA rulings, by contrast, could be challenged in court.

For media companies, that means compliance risk becomes harder to price. They lose a body with settled precedent and an appeal route, and gain one with vaguer rules and a higher uphold rate. Price’s bigger warning is about cost: “One defamation case is likely to cost a media defendant far more” than all the annual costs of handling BSA cases. Businesses that are the subject of unfair coverage lose a cheap route to redress and are left with an expensive one.

Dr Peter Thompson, deputy chair of Better Public Media, says the Government is replacing an enforceable regime with one that amounts to “best intentions”. The BSA’s own verdict is that “disestablishing the BSA is only half of a solution”. Public Media News makes the process point: this reform had been in development since at least 2021, and meaningful reform depends on careful policy work.

Now it is an election bet

The bill was introduced on the last sitting day before the election, with no time for a first reading. Goldsmith promised to get the legislation into the House before it rose, and he did. But that also means the rules broadcasters work under in 2027 depend on the 7 November result.

If the coalition returns, expect Price’s prediction to be tested. He warns that a non-member broadcaster will eventually do something terrible, and the Government will have to rebuild a standards regime from scratch. The platform-neutral reform officials designed would have avoided that. Good deregulation removes rules that cost more than they deliver. This removes a cheap regulator and leaves a gap that the market, the courts and a one-person Media Council will struggle to fill.

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