McCully Murray: Maori Television Service Bill — In Committee 
McCully Murray: Maori Television Service Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:608;Page:5107] 
Hon MURRAY McCULLY (NZ National—East Coast Bays) 
: 
 I am disappointed to have got the call quite as early as this because I rather expected that the Minister would seek the opportunity to answer the excellent questions posed by my colleague Pansy Wong. The Minister should reflect solemnly on the questions she asked and the theme behind those questions. We are here today in the Committee stage debating the schedules to this bill and they are important schedules. The first schedule outlines the appointment process for the electoral college the second schedule the process for directors and the third schedule the process for the chief executive. In respect of each of those schedules there has been a pantomime of events over the past 2 years for which this Minister owes the Committee an explanation. 
The Minister cannot with a straight face ask the Committee today to solemnly pass these three schedules knowing the history that has gone before them without providing at least an explanation. I say to the Minister in all seriousness that we will keep taking the calls and asking the questions until he does this Committee the courtesy of giving the explanations it deserves. 
The first question I want to ask him is about schedule 1 because that talks about the Maori Television Electoral College and that electoral college it is known has the gravest of concerns about many of the recent events in relation to the management of the Maori Television Service. I am not going to go on to rehearse some of those concerns. Some of them have been placed in writing to the Minister or one of his ministerial colleagues. I simply invite him to take a call and explain to the Committee the nature of the concerns held by the electoral college expressed to him both verbally and in writing and tell us what he has done to reassure the electoral college on these matters. He must tell the Committee about those concerns and particularly about his responses if he expects us to pass this schedule into law. 
More worryingly I want him to tell us about some matters that bear upon schedules 2 and 3. I have raised these matters in this Committee previously and so far the Minister has avoided giving an answer. The process by which Mr Derek Fox got himself to be appointed as the chief executive officer of the Maori Television Service was nothing less than a monumental jack-up—and that Minister knows it. The whole process by which he was put in place as the chairman in the first place was calculated to remove a political opponent from the establishment of an alternative Maori political party and to stop Mr Fox from beating the Minister of Maori Affairs in his own electorate. That is what this thing was all about in the first place. 
We were told that the position of chairman of the Maori Television Service was to be a small part-time $36000-a-year job. But that has been translated into a massive role—first of all of executive chairman and now of chief executive. The Minister needs to tell us how it is that his departmental chief executive signed off on that process. Did that chief executive ask some questions on his behalf to assure himself of the probity of that process? I know he did. I know that Mr Leith Comer signed a memorandum asking those questions and that he was far from satisfied with the answers. I want the Minister to tell us what those questions were and what the answers were. 
How was it that there was an appointment process that Mr Fox himself presided over as the chairman of the appointment committee? He sat on the board for the report-back process and only when his own nomination came up did he leave the room. What was it that saw him appointed by three votes to two with one of those votes being a proxy? I want the Minister to stand and tell us why we should have confidence in passing these provisions particularly schedules 2 and 3 when he knows that the process that has already preceded this discussion in the Committee today is shonky has been rightly criticised by his own officials is one that his own chief executive has most serious reservations about and does not meet the smell test by any standard. Why was a decision made to proceed with the appointment to announce the appointment of Mr Fox when he the Minister knows that the advice was that the appointment should not proceed?