Smith Murray: Maori Television Service Bill — In Committee 
Smith Murray: Maori Television Service Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:607;Page:5029] 
MURRAY SMITH (United Future) 
: 
 Part 2 deals with issues of accountability. I note that there are 19 clauses in this part—clauses 47 to 65—setting out all sorts of accountability on paper which the Maori Television Service is expected to meet. It seems to me that that is a very Pakeha way of doing things. Setting things in statute with great detail is the way that Pakeha try to make sure that there is some accountability. I am not sure that that is a Maori way of doing things. In fact we have already had a huge number of signals throughout this debate about the Maori way of doing things and I think that the Maori way of doing things is really revealed in the very beginning of the bill. 
I see that in clauses 47 to 65 there is an obligation on the Maori Television Service to provide a statement of intent. There is an obligation on it to provide an output agreement an annual report a statement of responsibility and a financial report. Those are all pretty standard things to see in legislation in terms of accountability as we understand it but what can we actually expect the Maori Television Service to do about them? The signals are very very clear. The report of the Maori Affairs Committee states: “In its submission the Service argues that accountability requirements fetter the ability of its board to meet its obligations (set out in clause 8). It says a preferable structure would be to establish the Service under the Companies Act 1993 which it argues would remove many of the accountability requirements.” So we can see there exactly what the service thinks in terms of the provisions that require it to be accountable and there are ways of doing that that we could examine. We could put our thumbs to our noses and there are some other things that have happened up at Waitangi from time to time that also demonstrate what Maori think sometimes when Pakeha try to tell them what to do. 
The select committee said in response that the service will largely be funded by the Government for the foreseeable future that the responsible Ministers will be accountable to Parliament for that funding and that therefore accountability requirements are necessary. That is true. But the service has already told us very very clearly what will happen. We can have all the words we like all the words in the world—we can have all 19 clauses stating that the service has to be accountable—but at the end of the day I know what will happen. The sort of information that we will get out of this from the Maori Television Service will simply be a waste of time. The clauses provided are pretty general and I am sure that the Maori Affairs Committee will find year after year that the service will come back with inadequate reporting. I look forward to what the Audit Office will say about its reporting. I think it will be a bit of a hoot frankly. The service will come back and waffle around and effectively we will not get any answers. United Future knows about that because we did not get any answers when we were asking for some sort of indication as to viewership—who was going to listen to this channel. We could not get an answer. We were just told: “You’re Pakeha. You don’t understand Maori.” I can see that exactly that sort of thing will happen every time the service is asked to be accountable. I refer to the clause 50 “Contents of statement of intent’ and I notice that subclause (1)(j) states that there have to be some “performance targets or measures by which the performance of the Service and its subsidiaries may be judged:” I look forward to seeing those performance measurements. We have not seen any yet. This is a service that has already had millions and million of dollars put into it. There is a commitment for $30 million and for $40 million in 2 years’ time. It has had all those commitments for funding but where are the performance measures? Surely the service has been going long enough to be able to give a pretty precise account of what it is going to do with the money it has already been funded. But what do we see? We do not see a word and we cannot find out. The service does not even know how many people are going to watch this television channel yet all it does is complain that because the channel is UHF people will have to buy licences. Only a small proportion of people are actually going to see it let alone the rest of the country. 
There are no statistics and there is no research. Nothing has been done to tell us what is going to happen with this channel. There has been no clear statement from the service in terms of how it will spend this money. We can see very clearly from the way that the Maori Affairs Committee has already been treated and from the responses it has received from the service that the service will simply thumb its nose at any indication of being accountable for the money it has—so we can simply forget it.