Peters Winston: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Peters Winston: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:617;Page:13243] 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 We have in New Zealand a senseless TVNZ charter which underpins the nonsense that is occurring at TVNZ. The charter of course is just an exercise in political correctness and cultural drivel focused on ethnic programmes that are little more than social apartheid. It is part of this Government’s social engineering agenda and we oppose it. The charter has also confused the commercial imperative outlined in the State-Owned Enterprises Act. The State-owned enterprise is to be either a public service broadcaster or it is to be surely a commercial entity. It needs to be one or the other but it cannot be both. Nothing illustrates that point more than the debacle of Ross Armstrong—theformer National Party vice-president who was of course appointed by the National Party to most jobs but who is also one of Helen Clark’s current followers—who got away with fraud double-dipping and the serious misuse of taxpayers’ money. He got off scot-free and no one was held accountable. I find it very unusual that when Maori people commit fraud Don Brash and National and ACT are down on them like a ton of bricks—but not in the case of Ross Armstrong! They would have given him a knighthood if they still had one. 
I am really concerned that taxpayers’ dollars are being used to fly executives all over the world to stay in the best hotels under the guise of dubious claims that by doing so they will somehow provide a better service. We say that taxpayers’ dollars would be better spent here in New Zealand on promoting our already-proven film industry. What is really of concern of course is that TVNZ is a very very high-priced label and it lives under the dark shadows of the National Party’s no doubt intended policy plank of selling it the moment that National ever gets back into power. Well we all know that is not going to happen but nevertheless it cannot be easy for a television service to operate having a public mandate when it is to be put under the threat of sale. 
But the real issue today is this: why have the TVNZ executives not come along to the Commerce Committee and given us an explanation for the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of unlimited personal credit card spending on behalf of 11 of the executives and for a half hour being taken at the start of the year in a prime programme called  
Holmes 
 to try to do in somebody’s political career? 
I have news for those gentlemen and it is all bad. We want them to come along and explain each credit carddetail by detail. 
R Doug Woolerton 
: Oh they won’t do that. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Well they will have to because in a fit of macho behaviour the man at the top promised that. He even asked me whether I wanted details of the make-up allowance account too. I said yes of course if he wanted to give it to me that would be fine. 
I want to know what the clothing allowance of Paul Holmes is. I want to know what Susan Wood’s clothing allowance is. Is it $25000 $35000 or $55000? Let us find that out. Those people made a big job of Tuku’s underpants. Now they have put all the clothes on the other body and I want to know what their clothing account is—or is it just limitless? Do they spend what they like? Is it true that at the end of the year they divvy all the clothes up and have a little auction amongst themselves? [ 
Interruption 
] Not on the market no—a very limited market. 
R Doug Woolerton 
: Who’d want a gift of Holmes’ clothes? 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: That is true. Maybe Mark Peck would pop along and get a decent suit. Anyway to cut a long story short we want to know when TVNZ’s executives are going to turn up and we want to be certain as a House that they do not treat Parliament and the Commerce Committee with contempt. In short we want them to show us what has been going on. That must surely be in the interests of TVNZ because we know what a huge believer it is in public accountability. It is the absolute paragon of virtue when it comes to public accountability and we want to give it a chance to demonstrate just how much it means by that. 
R Doug Woolerton 
: Is this a Tui’s ad? 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Yeah right. This is not another Tui’s advertisement. 
Hon Member 
: Don’t be cynical. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I am not being cynical. I just want to make it very clear to TVNZ that if it thinks it is going to stitch up somebody’s career with a tissue of lies and get people to perjure themselves in not one affidavit but three then there are consequences. 
I want TVNZ to know it has picked on the wrong person here. 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I want to pick up on the issue of credit cards but before I do so I would like to touch on two other issues relating to TVNZ’s financial review. The first is that TVNZ assured us that the $10.7 million in taxpayer funding it received to implement the charter in 2002-03 was all spent on programmes that met the criteria spelt out by the charter. But when we actually looked at how it had spent the money when it finally published that information retrospectively in its annual report we discovered that it had spent more than a million dollars on buying in over 1000 hours of BBC World Service programming and other foreign programming. I have no problem with TVNZ buying in BBC World Service programming but I have to ask why it is spending taxpayers’ money—charter funding—on buying in thousands of hours of foreign current affairs programming when for example we have only 24 percent local content on TV2. In fact most of that programming—the 1000 hours—screens between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. How does that conform with the charter funding criteria and why are we spending millions of dollars on that? The Minister said last week in answer to a question in the House: “No charter funding is spent on any of the network’s major news and current affairs programmes.” Yet we learn from the annual report that more than 1000 hours of charter funding was spent on buying those foreign current affairs programmes. Was the Minister misleading the House in his answer? 
A second issue is this: how has current affairs been improved under the charter? We had a lot of rhetoric about what would happen but what has been delivered? Firstly 92 fewer hours of current affairs have been screened since the charter came in. Secondly TVNZ has dropped the flagship current affairs programme  
Assignment 
 has sacked 14 current affairs staff—allegedly to save $4 million in its news and current affairs budget—and now we learn it is paying twice the market rate to buy in yet more foreign current affairs and news programmes. What on earth is going on there? And what about TV2 the channel that our children and young people watch? TVNZ acknowledged during the review that it did have a legal obligation to deliver the charter on both channels. But then we learnt that TVNZ is screening less than half of the local content on TV2 the programme our young people watch that it is on Television One. In fact it is screening a pitiful 24 percent on TV2. How can it be implementing the charter equally on TV2 when it is showing a mere 24 percent of local programmes on that channel? That is simply not good enough. Where are the performance criteria that we have been waiting for? 
On the question of credit cards which Winston Peters has now raised that was an issue I raised during the financial review. Mr Peters has focused on the 11 executives who have unlimited spending. But in fact when one looks at the report one sees there were far more than that. An extraordinary 462 staff in TVNZ have company credit cards of whom an astonishing 89 staff have unlimited spending on their credit cards and a further 66 have spending limits of up to $15000. Why would we have almost 500 staff with credit cards many of which have unlimited spending in an organisation with a public service culture? We were told that there is no explicit policy relating to the number of credit cards allocated to staff. TVNZ refused to tell us about credit card usage by its senior executives. It did acknowledge that 11 senior staff had spent $316000 last year but basically TVNZ would not tell us about the rest. We have had to ask the TVNZ executives to come back to the Commerce Committee to try to answer those questions. It is almost unheard of that we have had to recall them to the committee yet again in order to try to understand why such an extraordinarily large number of staff have credit cards and how they can be made accountable for that expenditure.