Copeland Gordon: Urgent Debates — Budget Advertising Programme—Report of Auditor-General 
Copeland Gordon: Urgent Debates — Budget Advertising Programme—Report of Auditor-General 
[Volume:619;Page:15341] 
GORDON COPELAND (United Future) 
: 
 I would like to begin by congratulating the Hon Murray McCully and I guess the National Party research team on first of all spotting the fact that this $21.15 million was going to be spent on communicating the Working for Families package; and secondly I would like to sincerely congratulate him on having the good sense to write to the Auditor-General and ask for the matter to be examined and examined in detail. The other thing I want to do is to congratulate the Speaker on having the good sense today to allow this debate to occur because I think it is a very very important debate and one that in some ways is overdue. 
I say that because the current Government has gained a reputation as being very good at spending other people’s money. There is a maxim of course that Governments do not have any money unless it is first taken off the citizens of the country. So first of all it should clearly be understood that this $21 million has been collected from the people of New Zealand and then spent on an advertising campaign. A minute ago when Richard Prebble was speaking I thought he was going to say that he knew where the money was going to go and I thought he was going to say “into the pockets of the advertising agents”. Because that is actually where the money is going to go. I think we need from time to time as a House to say: “Hang on a minute this is money that belongs to the citizens of the country. Are we being good stewards? Are we doing the right thing in spending the money in this particular way?”. After all in a sense any Government really becomes like the trustee for its citizens and one of the obligations on any trustee is to ensure that money is spent prudently. 
 When I looked at the Auditor-General’s report I asked myself a few basic questions maybe from my business background. The first question I asked myself was why this money was being spent. The report states in one place that 300000 families will receive the Working for Families assistance. But I draw the House’s attention to the fact that attached to that report is schedule No. 1 which under the Ministry of Social Development part of it states that the forecast number of new clients is actually 37000. Under the part relating to the Inland Revenue Department it states that the number of new clients is 48000. If those figures are added together it means that 85000 expected new clients will come into the Working for Families package. The other 215000 are already getting certain entitlements. They already have a relationship with the Ministry of Social Development or the Inland Revenue Department. Because we already have the postal address of those people we can simply send them a letter stating that that is the deal. That can be done in a multiplicity of languages and that will be no great problem. However the strategy of the bright people who have put this campaign together is not to hunt down those 85000 people but to blast the whole 1.9 million families of New Zealand with mainstream repeated generic advertising that will be spread across 3 years. 
Steve Chadwick 
: Because it’s so good. 
GORDON COPELAND 
: Great we all want to sit in our lounge every night and hear the same message for the next 3 years! Get real! That package is for 85000 families out of 1.9 million. 
I shall say a bit more about this. My colleague Judy Turner and I have sat here and done a bit of creative thinking. If the goal is to get a message to 85000 families how should it best be done? I have some suggestions to put to the House. First I suggest that the Government prints its material in all the different languages used in this country: Samoan Maori English and some of the other major language groups and send a letter to every family—1.9 million families—in the country. The cost at $2 per letter which would include all the printing the language and preparation of material would be $2.8 million and I think that would be a very generous allocation. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Do we know where they live? 
GORDON COPELAND 
: Well we would send the letter to every family in the country—1.9 of them—and all it would cost is $2.8 million. The next step would be that we would tell families that if they qualified for those new packages we want them to let us know by filling in the form in the letter and sending it back to us. If it turned out that that family qualified we would send it $100 in the mail by return. The cost for 85000 tickets would be $8.5 million. So for a cost of $11.3 million we would get the job done and get it done well. So Judy Turner and I in the space of about 15 minutes have just saved the taxpayers of this country $10 million. We have just done that while the speeches have been going on. We asked ourselves if we were doing this what would we do and that is our answer. I think that would be far more effective than the crazy $21.15 million generic advertising campaign on all television channels with separate advertisements from the Inland Revenue Department and Ministry of Social Development and not even bothering to coordinate that. The strategy is very poorly thought through and it is poorly targeted. 
I have seen the Inland Revenue Department do much better than this. Before I came to this House I was the financial administrator of the Catholic Archdiocese of Wellington. At that stage the Inland Revenue Department wanted to get in touch also with all of those families who were entitled to the current family support package. The department made up a number of multilanguage brochures sheets and so forth that went out to all the churches in the country. It said to Samoan churches: “You’re in touch with the Samoan community. Could you get one of these to every person who comes to your church on Sunday?”. The Samoan churches said that they would do that. The department did the same with Catholic churches and other churches. It did it with other big charities. We all participated in getting that information to the families that we knew were needy and therefore would qualify. 
A strategy like that could probably be more effective and that whole thing for 85000 people with 200000 bits of information could be done—and I have been very generous here—for say $3 million. If that will do the job in this debate we have saved the taxpayer not $10 million but $18.15 million. I make those points just to illustrate that this $21.15 million strategy is really not a good use of public money. 
I also take this opportunity to mention one other thing. As members are probably aware I am a member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee. The Auditor-General comes before the committee once a year and we talk to him about various matters. This year I asked the Auditor-General whether the Government dispensed money in this country at the moment to non-Government organisations without a requirement for those organisations to produce audited accounts. He said yes the Government did that. 
If an organisation in this country applies to the Lottery Grants Board it cannot get a grant without producing audited accounts. By the way the Finance and Expenditure Committee reported back to the House that that issue should be addressed. That is extremely poor stewardship. I have written to the Minister for Sport and Recreation on that issue because it includes grants being disbursed through Sport and Recreation New Zealand which see huge amounts of money being dished out to all sorts of organisations that do not have to produce audited accounts in return. I can go to the health budget and tell members that the same sort of thing is happening. 
It is time that this was brought to an end and that we established proper standards of accountability because at the end of the day we are spending the money that we in the first instance have taken away from our citizens. We should be good stewards with that money careful with it and bring to an end—what is the right word—the prodigal methodology that this Government has adopted of scattering money around like confetti. We would not have all those hip hop scandals and those other things or trouble with one of the members of this Parliament if we adopted the simple procedure: “You don’t get money from us unless you produce audited accounts.”