Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak on my colleague Melissa Lee's fantastic member's bill. There's going to be quite a contrast between the previous speaker and myself but I have to respect her passion and enthusiasm for the subject. However that's about where we finish in agreement. I think the previous speaker Jenny Marcroft said there was no objective in the bill. There is an objective: it's transparency. It's all about—Hon Chris Hipkins: More red tape.STUART SMITH: —actually understanding what is being done. Actually I hear a bit of a yapping over there about red tape. Actually all this data is actually gathered. The only thing at the moment is NZ On Air only publish the top-10 performing programmes that they actually fund. So the data is all there. It's easily gathered.We're in a new world today and unfortunately those supporting the old formats of media are actually being left behind. They're being overrun. What's important about having objective measures is understanding your audience. That's not at all to say we should only fund the most popular programmes but we have to ensure we're reaching the audience that we want to. If we set out to target a programme at a certain audience how do we know if we're reaching them? If we don't measure it in some way we won't know. Of course there's a bit of a fear of sunlight here and in the industry I feel—particularly on the other side of the House—and I think that's a shame.Great programmes like Country Calendar have been funded by NZ On Air. It's a phenomenally successful programme. Ironically it's a country subject but the audience is mostly based in Auckland and female. How do we know that? Because they gather that data. The producers of that show do a lot of work to ensure that they balance off telling really good country stories but also ensuring they appeal to that audience that watches it every week.If they didn't have that data they wouldn't know how to keep that programme up in the minds of people. The whole world has changed in this space. We used to have a lot of long-form documentaries in New Zealand and around the world in fact. That has gone by the wayside except for on YouTube now. That has become the new hot sector on YouTube which is long-form videos interviews with people like Joe Rogan or the Weinstein Brothers. You know I watched an hour long interview the other night with Bjorn Lomborg.Those things are very popular and yes they don't appeal to a mass audience but they are getting millions of hits. The only reason we know that is because that's easily measured on YouTube and it's publicly available. You can see it. The viewer can see how many people have watched it. So it's really important that we know that. It may be that we need to have our taxpayer dollars looking at doing those long-form sorts of interviews and putting them up on YouTube rather than broadcasting them on TV. But that's what we should be aiming at.We've got a broadcasting system that is here to tell our stories but how do we know that people are listening? It seems that there's a selective deafness on the other side. Well you know it's all about socialism on that side obviously. But I think it's quite interesting reading the Better Public Media Trust chair Peter Thompson's quote—and this is the mentality of it—he thought the bill would pervert the whole point of having public content funding agencies because it would expose them to [the cool winds of] performance".Well you know really he has to come back to the real world. It is a world where we want to ensure that our public expenditure goes to the direction we aim it at not into some sort of ether and have it all disappear down the toilet.Kieran McAnulty: Save Country Calendar.STUART SMITH: Country Calendar's a great show. Actually I'd like to wind up with the one union that I really support—apart from the rugby union—which is the Taxpayers' Union and that is Jordan Williams whose great quote I think was that he called this bill—it should be renamed the "Spinoff TV Memorial Bill". On that note I commend this bill to the House."