SpeechHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. Do you know what? For the last 18 months or so we've been having a bit of a discussion about spending. My party the Opposition party has been very critical of the amount of unnecessary spending that this Government has embarked on that has led to domestic inflation—I think it's 6.3 percent with overall inflation of 7.3 percent—and the constant refrain we hear from the Minister of Finance and his Government is What would the National Party cut?". Well we could start with the $327 million waste of money that this merger has embarked upon. In fact there are many many more. As the previous finance spokesperson I think that the last count I had at the end of last year was about $12 billion of unnecessary spending and this wasn't even part of it. So there are plenty of reasons why this bill should not go ahead—I can think of 327 million of them. It is important I think to reflect on the history of this because this bill has had in its gestation three broadcasting Ministers: the current Minister Willie Jackson; the previous Minister the Hon Kris Faafoi; and of course Clare Curran who is no longer with us and it wasn't just in her role of Minister of Broadcasting that she commenced this process. The genesis was actually in her role as Opposition spokesperson where she advocated all manner of changes to public sector broadcasting and for reasons which I don't know she went on a bit of a tête-à-tête with one of the previous National broadcasting Ministers Craig Foss about what was more important: content or platform. I think what Barbara Edmonds has just demonstrated to the House—a fellow Gen Xer—is that we the parents of Gen Z do not understand how our children are getting their content. But it ain't through TVNZ and it ain't through RNZ and it's not going to be despite her claims through a merged entity of the two. Content matters more than platform and this platform is not going to draw more people to it; it may well drive them away. So we don't know why we're doing this. It was a fanciful idea from the Hon Clare Curran that for reasons that continue to elude me this Government is continuing on with and I think there are just so many questions that we don't have answers to. If we did we wouldn't be able to support it anyway but it would certainly give us much better grounds for not supporting it. But the first question is what problem are we trying to solve and it was not clear from Minister Faafoi's press release in March this year what problem we were trying to solve. He talked about New Zealanders continuing to have access to reliable trusted independent information which is a concession that they already had it. They already had through TVNZ and RNZ in his view—and I agree with him—access to reliable trusted independent information and local content. Then he went on to say "Well we know the media landscape is changing." That's true but it's about changing content and making that content available on the multiplicity of platforms that are now available. Ms Edmonds talked about YouTube just one of a plethora of digital platforms that our children watch. I can't remember the last time they watched television to get information or entertainment. What Mr Faafoi's press release doesn't do is say why and how and those are the important questions that would enable us to understand what problem we're trying to solve. The second question is by what metric or manner is the Government claiming that this merged entity is going to earn the Crown and the taxpayer $306.1 million over six years as is stated in the Cabinet paper. RNZ is not a profit-making entity now and it won't be in the future. TVNZ has gone through a succession of roller-coaster financial performances which up until about 2020 was really just chump change: 2017 $1.4 million; 2018 $5.1 million; and 2019 $2.9 million in after-tax earnings. Now it did do better in 2020—that's true—but there's no real indication that it's going to maintain that level of profitability that would get it anywhere near a $301.6 million rate of return over the next six years. So the numbers are plucked out of the air. The really important question I think is why on earth is it going to cost $327 million to merge two entities that actually in and of themselves aren't changing materially in the near future or at least there's no indication from any of the documents that the Government has released—$327 million. That is more—in fact considerably more I think—than the total gross revenue of TVNZ for a whole year and that's what they're telling us they are going to spend to put two mature organisations together. I think there is probably a Curran legacy in all of this and that suddenly RNZ is going to compete with TVNZ or RNZ+. Remember that was her great idea in 2018 which was that RNZ was going to go on a digital video platform. But what's the point of that if we have a mature television platform already in TVNZ? So there's nowhere that I can see that this sort of money is necessary and it certainly isn't appropriate in my view. I think Joseph Mooney hit the nail on the head when he talked about the track record of this Government when it comes to mergers because it seems to me that whatever problem the Government perceives their answer is merger; their answer is Wellington. We merged 16 polytechnics into one on the basis that it would reduce the combined deficits that they were making of around $55 million. Erica Stanford: How did that go? Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: That's a very good question Mrs Stanford. It went very badly. They lost $110 million by the best estimates in the last financial year and the thing hasn't even got off the ground yet. That's an example of where if there is good and bad in a sector use the good as the exemplar. Use the Southland Institutes of Technologies and the Otago Polytechs and expect that of all of them. If there were problems—and I don't even think there really were—in TVNZ and/or RNZ fix those problems. Become more nimble and more ready to adapt to those new digital platforms and to reach out to an audience that may have turned away from them. Fix those issues rather than merge. Why merger is always the answer just completely eludes me and sadly we've seen this again not just with our polytechs but with our DHBs. Just as the polytech mergers were a complete failure I expect that the DHBs' merger into two entities is going to be similarly problematic and costly and will not add a single bit of value to patients in New Zealand. So here we are wasting the House's time on a merger that's unnecessary. It's inappropriate it's incredibly expensive and it will fail to deliver whatever the amorphous improvements that the successive Ministers of Broadcasting under this Government have said they will do. It's a shame that we're having to oppose this. It's a shame we're having to waste the House's time on it. This is a really bad idea. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Members I'm going to go back to the order I should have been in and I apologise to Jamie Strange and call him."