Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media Bill

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak in respect of the Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media Bill. The National Party is opposed to this bill. The move to amalgamate Radio New Zealand and TVNZ is yet another wasteful and pointless move by the Government, adding yet more bureaucracy, yet more costs and largesse to our public sector. It will reduce media plurality in New Zealand and further erode public trust in New Zealand media. We should instead be supporting the growth of our media content industry—a vital cultural export as part of New Zealand’s tourism and digital economy—not amalgamate it and not waste money on it in the wrong places.

Unfortunately, we have seen a continuation of a programme by this Government to centralise various organisations and spend a lot of money on them in the hope that it’s going to lead to better outcomes. The National Party does not believe that is going to be the case with merging Radio New Zealand and TVNZ. It’s going to create another mega-entity, with an extraordinary $327 million being spent on it over three years, as the country faces a cost of living crisis.

We have seen this Government try this already with Te Pūkenga, the merger of 16 polytechs and institutes across the country. Back in 2019, the sector was facing an expected shortfall of $48 million, and the Government centralised all of those polytechs together into an organisation called Te Pūkenga in the expectation that it was going to lead to better outcomes. Well, what have we seen? We’ve seen them spend $200 million on that merger. We have seen the default balloon to $110 million, so it’s doubled in three years, with a $200 million spend on it. This, unfortunately, gives us a good indication of the trajectory of where this merger of Radio New Zealand and TVNZ is likely to go—$327 million being spent on it over three years. Is it going to lead to better outcomes? Unfortunately, this Government’s track record shows that no, it will not.

It’s an incredibly expensive exercise, and already we’ve seen millions of dollars spent on contractors, reviews, and working groups since 2017. The Government has so far failed to give any financials to back a Budget 2020 assertion in the summary of initiatives that the new media entity would make $306 million in the next six years. So all we have to go on is a dart thrown at the dartboard and the Government saying that it’s going to make a whole lot of money, but we’ve got no financials to back that up. The legislation is vague, leaving nearly everything to an unaccountable public bureaucracy. Unfortunately—

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: Typical Labour.

—again—very typical Labour, as my colleague the Hon Scott Simpson says, and we’ve seen this again and again. With Te Pūkenga, unfortunately we’ve had a chief executive who’s gone on personal leave, and the sector is at a loss as to the work programme they’re supposed to be delivering.

These things are important. The media industry is an incredibly important part of New Zealand’s democratic and constitutional framework. In fact, it’s what is often called the fourth estate. So its role is to reflect New Zealand back to itself. It is to hold the organs of Government to account. It is to hold the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary to account and to reflect those stories back to New Zealand so New Zealanders can make informed decisions and choices about the country they live in. So this is this is a really important part of our constitutional framework.

Unfortunately, we have seen over the last few years an increasing loss of trust amongst some members—or many members, in fact—of our communities. In fact, we’ve had many emails being sent to us and we’ve been hearing around the country—and I’ve certainly heard it many times myself—a loss of trust in the media and that a large section of New Zealand is being completely turned off from the publicly funded media and is feeling that the public media spending isn’t leading to stories that reflect their concerns and reflect the country that they want to live in. So it’s really important that we have a public sector media that can reflect those interests, and, to have that, we need diversity in media. Unfortunately, this megamerger, this mega-entity is going to reduce that plurality, reduce that diversity of opinion and diversity of structures in our media landscape, and that is a great shame. So the National Party does not commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Now, I have eight very beautiful children between the ages of nine and 18. What I’ve seen with my children is that they don’t actually watch the TV; they stream. They stream most of their media online. It’s a real fight in our home living room in order to be able to take the remote and say to my kids, “Can you just stop streaming that? I want to watch the news.” It’s that problem that this bill is grappling with and was part of the submission process that it went through.

We have a great public media in New Zealand, but things are changing. We want our children to be able to continue to access that great public media. We also need strong, independent journalism, but you can’t have that if all that your children are watching is YouTube—because that’s just the way of this world. Again, my children are primary school age, intermediate age, college age, and at university; right throughout that spectrum, they are streaming online.

So this bill creates a futureproofed model; it creates an ability for New Zealand to have strong, independent journalism; and it provides an ability for our children in the future to have access to great public media. On that note, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Do you know what? For the last 18 months or so, we’ve been having a bit of a discussion about spending. My party, the Opposition party, has been very critical of the amount of unnecessary spending that this Government has embarked on that has led to domestic inflation—I think it’s 6.3 percent, with overall inflation of 7.3 percent—and the constant refrain we hear from the Minister of Finance and his Government is “What would the National Party cut?”. Well, we could start with the $327 million waste of money that this merger has embarked upon. In fact, there are many, many more. As the previous finance spokesperson, I think that the last count I had at the end of last year was about $12 billion of unnecessary spending, and this wasn’t even part of it. So there are plenty of reasons why this bill should not go ahead—I can think of 327 million of them.

It is important, I think, to reflect on the history of this, because this bill has had in its gestation three broadcasting Ministers: the current Minister, Willie Jackson; the previous Minister, the Hon Kris Faafoi; and, of course, Clare Curran, who is no longer with us, and it wasn’t just in her role of Minister of Broadcasting that she commenced this process. The genesis was actually in her role as Opposition spokesperson, where she advocated all manner of changes to public sector broadcasting and, for reasons which I don’t know, she went on a bit of a tête-à-tête with one of the previous National broadcasting Ministers, Craig Foss, about what was more important: content or platform.

I think what Barbara Edmonds has just demonstrated to the House—a fellow Gen Xer—is that we, the parents of Gen Z, do not understand how our children are getting their content. But it ain’t through TVNZ and it ain’t through RNZ and it’s not going to be, despite her claims, through a merged entity of the two. Content matters more than platform, and this platform is not going to draw more people to it; it may well drive them away.

So we don’t know why we’re doing this. It was a fanciful idea from the Hon Clare Curran that, for reasons that continue to elude me, this Government is continuing on with, and I think there are just so many questions that we don’t have answers to. If we did, we wouldn’t be able to support it anyway, but it would certainly give us much better grounds for not supporting it.

But the first question is what problem are we trying to solve, and it was not clear from Minister Faafoi’s press release in March this year what problem we were trying to solve. He talked about New Zealanders continuing to have access to reliable, trusted, independent information, which is a concession that they already had it. They already had through TVNZ and RNZ, in his view—and I agree with him—access to reliable, trusted, independent information and local content.

Then he went on to say, “Well, we know the media landscape is changing.” That’s true, but it’s about changing content and making that content available on the multiplicity of platforms that are now available. Ms Edmonds talked about YouTube, just one of a plethora of digital platforms that our children watch. I can’t remember the last time they watched television to get information or entertainment. What Mr Faafoi’s press release doesn’t do is say why and how, and those are the important questions that would enable us to understand what problem we’re trying to solve.

The second question is by what metric or manner is the Government claiming that this merged entity is going to earn the Crown and the taxpayer $306.1 million over six years, as is stated in the Cabinet paper. RNZ is not a profit-making entity now and it won’t be in the future. TVNZ has gone through a succession of roller-coaster financial performances, which up until about 2020 was really just chump change: 2017, $1.4 million; 2018, $5.1 million; and 2019, $2.9 million in after-tax earnings. Now, it did do better in 2020—that’s true—but there’s no real indication that it’s going to maintain that level of profitability that would get it anywhere near a $301.6 million rate of return over the next six years. So the numbers are plucked out of the air.

The really important question, I think, is why on earth is it going to cost $327 million to merge two entities that actually in and of themselves aren’t changing materially in the near future, or at least there’s no indication from any of the documents that the Government has released—$327 million. That is more—in fact, considerably more, I think—than the total gross revenue of TVNZ for a whole year, and that’s what they’re telling us they are going to spend to put two mature organisations together.

I think there is probably a Curran legacy in all of this and that, suddenly, RNZ is going to compete with TVNZ, or RNZ+. Remember, that was her great idea in 2018, which was that RNZ was going to go on a digital video platform. But what’s the point of that if we have a mature television platform already in TVNZ?

So there’s nowhere that I can see that this sort of money is necessary, and it certainly isn’t appropriate, in my view. I think Joseph Mooney hit the nail on the head when he talked about the track record of this Government when it comes to mergers, because it seems to me that whatever problem the Government perceives, their answer is merger; their answer is Wellington. We merged 16 polytechnics into one on the basis that it would reduce the combined deficits that they were making of around $55 million.

💬 Erica Stanford: How did that go?

That’s a very good question, Mrs Stanford. It went very badly. They lost $110 million, by the best estimates, in the last financial year, and the thing hasn’t even got off the ground yet. That’s an example of where, if there is good and bad in a sector, use the good as the exemplar. Use the Southland Institutes of Technologies and the Otago Polytechs and expect that of all of them.

If there were problems—and I don’t even think there really were—in TVNZ and/or RNZ, fix those problems. Become more nimble and more ready to adapt to those new digital platforms and to reach out to an audience that may have turned away from them. Fix those issues rather than merge.

Why merger is always the answer just completely eludes me, and, sadly, we’ve seen this again not just with our polytechs but with our DHBs. Just as the polytech mergers were a complete failure, I expect that the DHBs’ merger into two entities is going to be similarly problematic and costly and will not add a single bit of value to patients in New Zealand.

So here we are, wasting the House’s time on a merger that’s unnecessary. It’s inappropriate, it’s incredibly expensive, and it will fail to deliver whatever the amorphous improvements that the successive Ministers of Broadcasting under this Government have said they will do. It’s a shame that we’re having to oppose this. It’s a shame we’re having to waste the House’s time on it. This is a really bad idea.

Members, I’m going to go back to the order I should have been in, and I apologise to Jamie Strange and call him.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I appreciate that. It did give me an opportunity to hear the previous member, Michael Woodhouse’s speech.

I’d like to acknowledge the work that the Hon Willie Jackson has done on this piece of legislation, the Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media Bill. The reality is, as we have heard from speakers on this side, the way that we consume public media is changing. The public media landscape is changing as society changes, and it’s important that as a Government we are responsive to these changes. That’s what the Minister is doing and, if the House does decide to send this bill to the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee, we will certainly welcome it. We’re a very hard-working select committee, I might add, and I hear support from other members behind me.

What this bill does is strengthen the delivery of public media services by providing a modernised—and that’s an important word, “modernised”—flexible legislative framework for Aotearoa New Zealand public media to operate under. The reality is that, with the emergence of the internet, with broadband being rolled out effectively right across New Zealand now, the way people consume content has changed. I remember coming home from school and we might be lucky maybe to get half an hour of a kids’ TV show, and then the news would come on and that would be it—and I would sometimes argue that that is possibly a good thing, as well! However, the way we consume content now is very much more online, right across all age groups, right across all demographics.

So, simply, what this bill is doing is responding to a change in New Zealand society and New Zealand culture. I think it’s an excellent piece of legislation. I look forward to it going through the select committee process and seeing what we hear from the public on it. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It gives me great pleasure to take a call on this bill. Something that I care deeply, deeply about is our public broadcasting.

Just to keep on with the theme of the previous National member, Michael Woodhouse, who contributed to this debate—if he’s going to label our generations, then I am a proud millennial standing in this House. I do consume a lot of media on online platforms and podcasts. My lifesaving grace at this moment whether it’s on our long journeys, flying down to Wellington, or whether it’s in car rides—podcasts are probably one of the primary ways of me getting my information. I think most of my millennial friends would agree with me as well and share that lifestyle. Then the second way would probably be through YouTube and YouTube videos, which are very informative most of the time.

But I think this goes to show the importance of funding our public media sector in the right way. I still remember standing on the courts of Aotea Square, making sure that our country kept our Radio New Zealand Concert FM, and the importance that young people actually held in terms of having that classical music station in our country. I still remember speaking about how that was my very first time becoming a recorded artist—our orchestra and our choirs recorded by Radio New Zealand Concert FM, and being able to have my works played and broadcasted on that platform. That goes to show how important it is that this Government actually supports our public media entities.

The fact is that right now the Radio New Zealand - TVNZ legislation is not working any more—it wasn’t set up for the modern day context that we have at this moment. The fact that our next generation, our young people, are calling out for better-funded public media and for more quality platforms and content all at the same time is a show that this piece of legislation is great legislation. My hats off to the previous Minister, Minister Faafoi, as well as the current Minister, Minister Willie Jackson, for shepherding this bill to the House. I look forward to seeing it in select committee. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That the Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media Bill be considered by the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee.