Brash Don: Urgent Debates — Budget Advertising Programme—Report of Auditor-General 
Brash Don: Urgent Debates — Budget Advertising Programme—Report of Auditor-General 
[Volume:619;Page:15330] 
Dr DON BRASH (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance 
. [ 
Interruption 
] 
John Carter 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I am sorry to interrupt Mr Brash but that Minister in particular starts a barrage of interjection every time that Dr Brash gets on his feet. Before Dr Brash commences his speech can that Minister please be instructed from the Chair to close his mouth and not to interject in the way that he does. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: No I do not want any assistance on this matter. There will be no further interjections from that member while this member is speaking. I do not like that sort of interjection. 
Dr DON BRASH 
: I appreciate very much the opportunity of speaking to this very important issue in the form of a report from the Auditor-General to my colleague the Hon Murray McCully dated today. Some 3 months ago the Government brought its Budget down to the House. Included in that Budget was a commitment to spend $21.15 million on an advertising programme to promote the Working for Families programme including $11.59 million to be spent in the current financial year. At the time the National Party expressed extraordinary surprise at that very large expenditure. Let me put it in some perspective. Back in 1993 Helen Clark the then Labour health spokeswoman criticised the then National Government’s $2.5 million campaign to promote the health reforms. She said at that time: “The use of advocacy advertising paid for with $2.52 million of taxpayers’ money in an election year is a matter of major public concern.” Was it a coincidence she asked that the health campaign an “orgy of advertising” hit the public 5 months before a general election? 
The $21.15 million included in this year’s Budget is a very large expenditure programme and more than half that programme is scheduled for spending in this financial year immediately before a general election. That amount of money is more than eight times the spending that Helen Clark described in 1993 as “unreasonably large” and an “orgy of advertising”. 
Perhaps it is not surprising that the Government is embarking on a programme of such magnitude. It has collected an extra $34 billion in tax revenue in the last 5 years. The revenue from company taxes has gone up by some 72 percent over that time. The huge flow of revenue has made the Government very casual indeed about spending—hip-hop tours braying toilets— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Notwithstanding the fact that we have a Budget debate still going the member as you are aware has had a letter granted on a case that requires the urgent attention of the House. For the last 3 minutes he has not referred to that but has talked about the tax take hip hop and a number of things that are not relevant to the letter. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The member must not have been listening. I was. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: I do not want this to eat into the time. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I do not want to eat into the time either. But we on the Opposition side of the House are getting sick and tired of the tactics being deployed by Trevor Mallard and other Ministers. They may think that it is enormously clever to break up the Leader of the Opposition’s speeches. They know that they are in trouble politically and they do not want the people of the country to hear what he has to say. But we will not sit here in the House and tolerate that sort of behaviour any longer. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Let me tell the member that I thought I was doing my job pretty promptly on that matter. I do not think it required the member to restate that in what was not really a point of order. 
Dr DON BRASH 
: My colleague the Hon Murray McCully was so disturbed about the expenditure that he thought it appropriate to ask the Auditor-General whether he thought the spending of some 8 to 9 times the largest expenditure previously reported was appropriate. Today he received from the Auditor-General a report on that spending and it makes very disturbing reading indeed. 
The Auditor-General did not seek to make any comparison between the cost of this programme and that of other communications strategies because as he pointed out it was difficult to do that. Had he done so the sheer enormity of the proposed campaign would undoubtedly have been clear. But he did look carefully at the process by which $21.15 million found its way into the Budget. I will quote two or three sections from the Auditor-General’s letter. He stated: “We expected that there would be a detailed and robust analysis to support the Budget bid for a $21.15 million Communications Strategy. Such an analysis would include the nature of the Working for Families package changes the numbers and demographics of people affected by the changes the most appropriate means of communicating with these people and other identified target audiences and the comparative costs of appropriate communication options.” What the Auditor-General found fell significantly short of that. The report went on to state: “… in our view it should have been possible for the MSD and the IRD to have provided the advertising agency with information about the numbers of people likely to be affected by the Working for Families package changes and the nature and size of the target audience without necessarily disclosing specific information about the package. This could have enabled the advertising agency to make a more informed assessment of the communication needs and the likely costs and resulted in more precise costings to form the basis for the budget bid …”. 
The Auditor-General went on to state: “… our primary concern is with the robustness of the process of costing a significantly-sized Budget bid. The approval of the bid led directly to the parliamentary appropriation of $11.59 million for the first year’s funding in the Appropriation (2004/05 Estimates) Act. The effect of the Act is to authorise the Executive to incur the expenditure. Overall we would have expected a more robust process to be used and for more detailed information to be available to support a Budget bid for $21.15 million. The level of scrutiny by the Treasury of the Communications Strategy budget was less than we would expect for new expenditure of this magnitude.” Further on the Auditor-General stated: “We expected to find a co-ordinated approach with evidence of the two departments working together to develop a joint Communications Strategy for the Working for Families package and combining the use of resources wherever possible to achieve the most effective and efficient use of taxpayer resources. In February 2004 the MSD and the IRD decided to have a joint Communications Strategy. They worked together on the Strategy from then until the date of the Budget announcement. Nevertheless each department during that period took quite different and separate approaches to planning the communications activities they intended to lead under the Strategy.” 
The Auditor-General noted that the Ministry of Social Development had told him that it intended to use generic advertising through television and other media “to provide high level ‘brand awareness’ of the Working for Families changes …”. One has to wonder how that “brand awareness” differs from straight political propaganda. Finally the Auditor-General concluded that: “… in our view the planning of the communications strategy in the period leading up to the Budget announcement evidences a disappointing lack of consistency. This is particularly clear from the manner in which the departments went about planning for separately produced television advertisements and the separate and differing approaches to the nature and scale of the specific campaigns to promote the changes that each of the departments would be leading. … this letter has set out our concerns about the robustness of the process of costing the Budget bid and the lack of consistency in approach. Those concerns mean that it is not possible in our view to say that the budgeted costs are a realistic reflection of the likely actual cost of the communications campaign to promote the Working for Families campaign.” 
The report from the Auditor-General is profoundly disturbing. Though couched in the careful language of the Auditor-General it suggests that there has been a complete breakdown of proper process—a cavalier disregard of the processes that should guide the spending of more than $20 million of taxpayers’ money. What will the advertising actually achieve? Will we see the programme highlight the fact that a solo mother on welfare who is working between 10 and 20 hours a week will face a 92.2 percent marginal taxation rate if she works another hour? Will the campaign highlight that fact? I suspect that there is not a chance of that. We know because it has been highlighted in this House that a whole raft of families will face 80 percent 90 percent and nearly 100 percent marginal taxation rates from this Budget. We know that the Government claims that this Budget is about encouraging people to get off benefits and into work. We know that it will not do that. 
Ministers need to take responsibility for this serious lapse in process even if they cannot take responsibility—or will not take responsibility—for the contents of the Budget itself. It is particularly serious when there is a growing disregard for past conventions on taxpayer-funded advertising. When Prime Minister Jenny Shipley was in office in the 1990s she instigated quite specific rules that required the careful use of taxpayers’ funding in advertising and particularly she required approval by the Auditor-General for such situations. That has been quite deliberately ignored by the current Government. In just these last few days we have seen produced—not by parliamentary funding but by ministerial funding—a brochure that has in it undeniably political campaigning. It is undoubtedly political campaigning. There is no way that it could be dressed up as anything other than blatant political advertising and as a consequence we have referred that 1-page document to the Auditor-General for his report. This document does not comply with the standing procedure for the use of taxpayers’ money on advertising to the public. 
The report received by my colleague Mr McCully is a serious indictment on the way that this Government spends $21.15 million of taxpayers’ money. I think it is high time that this Government took some responsibility in spending that kind of money.