A 1989 law that even its enforcers wanted gone
Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith announced on Tuesday that the government would disestablish the Broadcasting Standards Authority, ending 37 years of statutory broadcast oversight. The replacement: industry self-regulation through the Media Council, a voluntary body founded in 1972 with no legal enforcement powers.
The case for abolition was straightforward. As Goldsmith told Newstalk ZB: “The world’s moved on and it’s obvious to everybody how we get our information has changed dramatically, and it was sort of looking after a thin slice of broadcasting, so it no longer made sense.”
He’s right. The government’s own media reform consultation from February 2025 showed that by 2024, Netflix reached 38% of New Zealanders daily while TVNZ1 managed only 34%. None of Netflix’s content fell under BSA jurisdiction. The BSA itself had been arguing for 15 years that the Broadcasting Act was no longer fit for purpose.
The numbers that made abolition inevitable
The Interim Regulatory Impact Statement from October 2024 laid bare the economics. The BSA’s total revenue was $1.732 million in 2023/24. Its broadcaster levy, set at 0.00051% of revenue, was expected to fall to just $0.6 million as the traditional broadcasting sector contracted. Crown funding had to grow from $0.609 million to over $1 million to keep the lights on.
For that spend, the authority handled 130 formal complaints and made 106 decisions. Its maximum fine was $5,000. It could ban a broadcaster for up to 24 hours. Nearly a million dollars in complaints resolution costs to produce a handful of upheld decisions each year, with penalties that wouldn’t cover a week’s advertising spend.
No serious person can argue that model deserved preservation.
The replacement that isn’t ready
But the government had options beyond “keep the broken thing” and “replace it with nothing enforceable.” It chose the latter.
The Media Council, which Goldsmith expects to become the primary regulator for journalism, currently operates with what media lawyer Steven Price estimates is one part-time staff member and volunteer members meeting four times a year. It handles roughly 100 complaints annually and has “no expertise in broadcasting”.
Membership is voluntary. Price’s prediction is blunt: “What is likely to happen, I expect, is that a non-member broadcaster will do something terrible and it will be a scandal that there’s no standards regime.”
Associate Professor Peter Thompson from Victoria University called the move “politically expedient” and “democratically indefensible”, warning of a “commercial race to the bottom” where operators ignore accuracy and fairness “with impunity.”
What the government’s own work recommended
Here is the uncomfortable detail. The government’s Interim Regulatory Impact Statement proposed a platform-neutral approach that would expand coverage to all professional media operating in New Zealand, not contract it to a toothless voluntary body. That option acknowledged the problem and solved it by modernising, not by retreating.
That option appears to have been set aside. The political context is hard to ignore. The announcement followed backlash after the BSA began regulating podcasts, including a complaint about The Platform. ACT’s Laura McClure called it a “massive win for free speech”. Deputy PM David Seymour called the BSA “a creature of 1989 before the internet existed”.
Why advertisers should be paying attention
The media sector employs more than 25,000 people and contributes $4.7 billion annually to the economy. For businesses that advertise in media, audience trust is what they’re purchasing. A Trust in News survey cited by Newsroom showed a slight uptick in public trust partially attributed to seeing media held accountable.
Remove the accountability mechanism and the trust premium erodes. That’s not a free speech argument. It’s a commercial one.
The government diagnosed the right problem. A regulatory regime covering a shrinking fraction of what people actually watch and listen to was absurd. But the prescription, handing oversight to a body with no powers, no resources, and no compulsion for anyone to participate, looks less like reform and more like a politically convenient way to make a coalition headache disappear. When the first serious incident arrives and nobody has jurisdiction, the question won’t be whether the BSA deserved to die. It will be why nobody built anything to replace it.
Sources
- Government to disestablish the BSA (2026-05-06)
- Scrapping Broadcasting Standards Authority will hit standards, experts say (2026-05-06)
- Broadcasting Standards Authority to be axed, self-regulation signalled (2026-05-06)
- Without BSA, ‘people will be able to say anything about anything’ – complainant (2026-05-07)
- Minister Paul Goldsmith on the BSA getting scrapped (2026-05-06)
- Interim Regulatory Impact Statement: Modernising professional media regulation (2024-10-21)
- Media Reform: Modernising regulation and content funding arrangements for New Zealand (2025-02-12)
- Broadcasting Standards Authority to be scrapped (2026-05-06)