In keeping up with the general business of parliament, we’d all be a little lost if it weren’t for Parliament TV.
It’s a service freely available to the public as a television channel on Freeview TV and other platforms, live-streamed on parliament website, while RNZ, who provide the audio, also broadcast that on AM radio. There’s even an app.
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Dean Brain, Head of Media at Kordia which operates Parliament TV, at the company's remote production studio in Avalon. Photo: Johnny Blades / VNP
A government-owned company, Kordia, has been broadcasting Parliament TV for 15 years via a remote production setup from its custom-built digital studio in Avalon: three days a week for thirty weeks a year, using eight cameras (seven of which are robotically controlled) placed in the debating chamber via a fibre network. Kordia’s Head of Media Dean Brain said that broadcasting the House when it’s sitting was fast-moving television.
“When we first started out it was very rule sensitive, about what we could and couldn’t show, and as time has progressed I guess we’ve earned trust from the people that control it, and we now have a clause that says ‘at our director’s discretion’, so if it tells a story we would show something.”
One of the main challenges, he said, is when the debate gets feisty in the chamber. The main rule is that if the Speaker is on his feet, Parliament TV must only show the Speaker.
Something PTV is not allowed to do is show a Member being booted out of the chamber, which is somewhat disappointing for us viewers. But there are plenty of other theatrics to keep people amused, from the intensity of Question Time to the somnolent musings of debates in the evening. Whether or not they know it, MPs are on show.
“Bill English, I think from memory, was always one that would always look up to see which camera was looking at him to get a shot, and I guess he played with it a bit in the early days,” Brain said.
Bill English: here's looking at you, kid. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
Refining the product
The sound and vision data is pumped out from the basement under the Beehive which is fed from the myriad cabling from Parliament House.
“There is such a mesh of cabling in this building that when you see it you could actually lose your mind,” said Greg Cotmore, a Parliamentary Officer in the Office of the Clerk who oversees broadcasting and is PTV’s go-to person at Parliament.
How PTV should use the downtime around sittings has long been a moot point, said Cotmore. Over the years Parliament TV has refined its product.
“When I started in 2011, when the House adjourned there was just a static screen with a message saying when the next sitting was. That was it. So technology, as it’s developed, and as we have the budget to acquire the new technology, that allows us to do different things.”
PTV has gradually updated the services that it provides, including closed captioning, overnight roll graphics (with information about select committees), a speech progress key that’s on the screen during debates, and the crawl along the bottom with information about what business is being conducted. In 2019, PTV began adding Te Reo translations.
Greg Cotmore, a Parliamentary Officer in the Office of the Clerk, who oversees broadcasting and Parliament TV. Photo: Johnny Blades
Increasingly, when the house isn’t sitting, there’s interesting viewing on Parliament TV, particularly the rich seam of New Zealand art presented under the Artvox series curated by Urban Art Foundation.
“Part of our Kaupapa is to make sure that every New Zealander gets the opportunity to see New Zealand art. So our kaupapa is to take the art out of the archives and put it where people can see it,” said the Foundation’s creative director Andrew Hagen.
“In my mind’s eye I always think of that little school way, way north of Auckland, where the children have very little opportunity to see what’s going on in the big cities; and the teacher putting the tv on and say okay, listen everybody, we’re going to have a look at a particular artist or a particular competition that we’re showing. And that to me is really important because it’s part of our education.”
Sign language endures
So there’s plenty to see on Parliament TV even if it’s not MPs ranting at each other. Another good feature of PTV, since 2014, is sign language.”
“We have New Zealand sign language interpreters on site for Question Time during New Zealand Sign Language Awareness Week and also for the delivery of the Budget, and also for other legislative debates and events in the chamber that are of interest to the Deaf Community,” Cotmore said.
The sign language interpreter is a fixed feature as a picture-in-picture box in the corner of the screen.
“It used to annoy certain viewers. I had one correspondent in Nelson who would regularly email and phone me and complain about the picture-in-picture box," Cotmore said.
"This person described to me what they did - they draped a tea towel over the corner so they couldn’t see the picture and picture box. Mercifully we don’t have any of those complaints again. We now see sign language interpreters everywhere. It’s now normalised.”
NZ Sign Language interpreter Melissa Sutton (Ngāti Maniapoto) in the Parliament TV sign studio Photo: ©VNP / Phil Smith
Parliament TV can be viewed on Freeview channel 31. It’s also made available in speech-by-speech clips via the Parliament TV On Demand part of Parliament’s website.