Opinion by Geoffrey Churchman

While I couldn’t give a Stuff about the other news and current affairs programs that the current TVNZ CEO Jodi O’Donnell announced will be axed as from ‘mid-May’, I am a fan of Fair Go, the weekly half-hour consumer affairs show that began in 1977. For the first 8 years it was presented by Brian Edwards and then Kevin Milne to 2008 who until recently lived in Waikanae.

While TVNZ news programs are dominated by biased, one-sided political propaganda, often factually inaccurate — Fair Go has challenged bad calls made by middle managers in banks and insurance companies, local council halfwits, dodgy lawyers, rogue tradesmen, cowboy contractors and general rip-off artists — what’s not to like about that? I’m told that it, as well as Sunday, are profitable.

Undoubtedly, what has made it on air has been only a small proportion of the cases that people referred to the Fair Go producers, but the message to all those in the above-mentioned categories was that if they didn’t improve their way of thinking, they could feature on a show, and they wouldn’t like it!

Last Monday’s show even took a hotel in Manly, Sydney to task, with a satisfactory outcome. If middle managers can’t see the impact of bad publicity, senior managers usually can.

There are also segments that are more light-hearted in nature: on Monday that involved a couple of car vanity plates that strange people complained to NZTA about — which Woke Kotahi did a knee-jerk reaction to and told the owners must be removed. One was OM, a meditation mantra that a man has adorned his car with for 37 years — what on earth is wrong with that? — and another was NUTZAC — nothing to do with the guy’s anatomy, more a contraction of NUTA and ZAC, the latter his first name. (There are a lot of strange plates that you see on the roads, I can remember seeing GOD, STONED, SWISH among many others, but that’s a seperate issue.)

But the essential point is that Fair Go provides a useful public service; so please, Ms O’Donnell, keep it!