July 29, 2024 • 10 mins
The New Zealand Film Commission has raised eyebrows by throwing two parties apiece for its outgoing acting chief executive, and for its incoming chief executive, for a total cost of $16,431.
In a kind of mirror image approval, incoming chief executive Annie Murray signed off the $8,627 price of two farewell parties for outgoing acting chief executive Mladen Ivancic; and Ivancic signed off the $7,804 price of two pōwhiri (welcome events) for Murray.
The celebrations took place in 2023, several months before the October election that ushered in a new Government and a “savings and efficiency drive” across the public sector – Budget 2024 reduced the NZFC’s baseline funding by 7.5% ($405,000 per annum).
Christopher Luxon says the Film Commission's spending on parties doesn't seem appropriate.
The Prime Minister told Mike Hosking that such spending won't do anything to attract companies like Apple, who are interested in doing film productions in New Zealand.
Luxon says for a company like Apple, what matters is that he's aware of what's going on, and that he's encouraging them to do to the project here, rather than elsewhere.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Tuesday morning. Prime Minister Christopher Lection's, well, it's very good
morning to you.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Good morning, Mike.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Now, I've got a lot of wastage going on. I
hope you're aware of this. Are you up on the
New Zealand Film Commission? And there are many and varied
parties that the taxpayer is funding.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
A little bit yep, what do you want to talk about?
Speaker 1 (00:17):
The part that it's allowed to happen and when does
it stop?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I'm sorry, I just said it again, the.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Part that it happens and when does it stop?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
The Film Commission?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Have we got a bad phone line or something.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
We might do? Sorry about that. You're breaking up a
little bit, but yes, you start again.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Okay. The Film Commission are hosting parties for people who
are leaving, and they're hosting parties for people who are arriving,
and it's costing us tens of thousands of dollars. Is
that acceptable?
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Well, again, I'm not aware of what they're doing exactly
in terms of their operational details. They're trying to attract
people to actually do projects here. We've got a good
amount of projects coming into New Zealand, which is good
for our our industry inter sector here that's been a
good thing. I'm not exactly sure what's appropriate or what
level they've been doing hosting and trying to attract projects
(01:07):
to New Zealand. I think it's good that they do
do that.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
But when a CEO arrives and they say let's have
a party for an arriving CEO and they spend eight
thousand dollars doing that, is that typical of the public service?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Well, that wouldn't seem appropriate to me. I mean, I
think you want to be able to have high level
engagement to welcome a CEO and to talk about the
project they want to get involved with. When I was
in California, for example, when I met with Apple, they
want to do a number of productions here in New Zealand.
They don't need a party for that. They just need
to know that I'm aware of what's going on, and
I'm encouraging them to choose US over Ireland or Yugoslavia
(01:40):
or some other place to do the project.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
So is there a message from the government top down
going to the government departments that we're not having parties
and they're unacceptable, or has that message been ignored or
was there no message at all?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
No that message is being applied on a regular basis,
and I've made it really, really clear. I'm expecting every
single public sector CEO to deliver within their budgets. You
would have seen us make big interventions on say Health
New Zealand recently Housing New Zealand, disability services. When we
give you a budget, we expect you to deliver it
and manage within the funds that we've got Health to Blasic, right,
(02:14):
thirty billion dollars to spend a year, sixteen point seven
billion going more in and then all of a sudden
the deficit emerges because there's very poor financial control and
understanding of what's going on. Unacceptable. That's why pro Commissioner
and so I think, you know, the message is pretty clear.
I don't know. I make it clear every day of
my interactions with CEOs and different officials about what we're
expecting to do, you know, And you imagine there'll be
(02:36):
some dumb stuff that happens, yes, and people want to
make sure that that's corected very very quickly. Right.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
What about the thirty three million that the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and Trade it project it nearly tripled in
cost since it started in twenty twenty one. It's been
a failure for all of its existence and the wider
ministry was made aware of it before millions of dollars
more were misspent. How does that happen?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, yeah, we'll come away. That's project that was i
think was picked off under our journ government and there
was over spending in there, and there's been interventions made
from the top of impact to make sure that's gripped up.
And when St Peter's Minister Foreign Affairs was briefed about
it and he's laid little down pretty firmly, and obviously
it don't quite a change happening as a result of that.
(03:18):
So you know, again those are the things that are happening.
I mean, there is literally in public spending important that
they understand that it's taxpayers money. They have to be
spent really prudently and you spend it as if it's
your own money, as if you actually do your own
family budget. So we're building that culture back into Wellington.
We have to build it back in But yep, that's
a good example of project that's overrun and it can't
(03:39):
be let If projects are over running, we want that
surface very quickly. We want to know about it, and
we wanted more an action plan to get it back
on track again and on time.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
So what's your observation of this? And this comes out
of your POSTCAB press conference, which once again I waited
my way through for forty minutes yesterday, as you did.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I appreciate you listening to that, I really do.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
I mean, you're telling us yesterday that members of boards
and exis, KISS and Health couldn't get basic financial information.
I mean, yes, is that possible?
Speaker 2 (04:08):
I don't know. That's why we've made the interventions we
have because when you told everything's five and then it
finds out, you find out there's actually not very good
cash flow analysis. There's twenty one different accounts, payout systems.
You know what actually happened, Let's be honest about it
was a really botched merger. We've seen it now in
TPOO King and we've seen in disability services. We've seen
(04:28):
it in KO, We've seen it in Health New Zealand
where actually when you remember mergers and acquisitions, well, if
you buy a new company, you really quickly identify the synities,
get out the duplication, make sure it's embedded properly into
the organization and you build a proper organization. In this case,
twenty one DHB is basically carried on big slack of
big layer of management over the top of it, and
(04:50):
no financial reporting and literacy to the board, provided to
the board, and the board not able and didn't ask
questions about information they needed to know. And so no
longer a bod, no longer a Gevin, a commissioner with
very big powers to actor and move very very quick
in less to leving and he'll be great. I think
you might have had him on the show, but you know,
he's a pretty straight talker. And I meet with him
now with Nikola Willis Shander Media, myself and him and
(05:13):
his commissioners, and we go on a regular meeting to say, right, oh,
what is happening this week, what are we doing, and
what are the challenges that you're encountering with In a
matter of a week and a bit Low and behold,
for the first time there's been in decent cash flow analysis,
which is when you're trying to run a large organization
eighty five thousand people, thirty billion dollars worth of spending
and more money coming into it, it's kind of a basic.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Right yea, it is. I just despair it what you're
having to deal with. Then I'm reading yesterday about the
National Disaster Coordination System, right, so a COP a common
operating platform. So New Zealand's latest attempt to build a
COP was abandoned weeks ago. The country lacks even a
proper foundation for one spatial data infrastructure, is what we're
talking about. This is despite Cabinet ordering an SDI to
(05:57):
be built in twenty fourteen, saying it would boosts the
economy by billions of dollars, organizations didn't want to share
their data. Not only has an SDI never been built,
the National Geospatial Office, which has only ever had two
or three people in it any way, folded in twenty eighteen.
And we wonder when it rains why the same crap
happens over and over and over again.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Data management is a major major issue, right And if
you don't collect the data, you can't analyze it, and
then you can't take action on it. And it's not
about just collecting data. You've got to have action and
insights from that data that then changes the way you
do things. And so you're right, whether it's in the
spatial planning space and land that we know that floods
and doesn't flood and then is consented at a local
(06:41):
government level. Frankly, whether it's things in the way that
local governments respond to common systems around emergency management. We
were very fortunate in christ Church that christ Church and
Seal and why Mack had the same system to deal
with porthills fires. But actually across the country sixty two
different district councils have different systems and so but in
(07:02):
government I don't personally believe is very good at building
IT systems. Are the right people to do that stuff,
and we do too much customization. We should take off
the shelf products in the digital space because we're meaning
billions and billions of dollars on IT projects and so
we're trying to get our hands around that as well.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Cheers, there's a report this morning. You've set aside too.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
And want to depression Mike.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
It's like they feel sorry for We have great.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Potential, but we have to sort this mess out and
this is what we're going to do. This is a
turn when I say turn around job, this is the
stuff that I'm talking about, and this is why New
Zealanders can't take good management for granted. You know, you
can have all the slogans you want, you can talk
all combined are much as much as you like, but
you've actually got to run stuff well and deliver it well.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
You've set aside two hundred and sixteen million, it's reported
this morning, contingency on these heat to tobacco products is one.
Is that true? If you've set aside two hundred and
sixteen million, as in the money you won't be getting
and it helps thirty seven thousand people, that's thirty thousand
dollars per person. Is that worth it?
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, there was a few things going on there. One
is there's a new category of products called heated tobacco.
You know, there's a whole bunch of new innovations in
that space. It's not you know that better products, we
believe for you than people being on cigarettes. We know
what vaping's done to lower smoking rates. If there's another
way in which we get people away from cigarette, that's good.
So we don't actually formally know what the growth of
(08:24):
that sector will look like over the next twelve months
or so. Having said that, we put the maximum contingency
away in case and what we've done. Is what we've
done is have the excise tax on those kind of products,
so there's still excise tax being paid. But we're trying
to incent people to move away from cigarette so we
can get our daily smoking rates down to five percent.
I've gone down from eight point six to six point eight.
(08:44):
We think we're actually on track to deliver smoke free
twenty twenty five, which is the five percent daily smoking rate.
And we're going to try it for twelve months and
let's see how it goes and put a review in place.
But we put maximum money aside from a contingency point
of view, not knowing what the uptake ultimately of these
products will look and feel like. Currently it's low, and
then we'll review it in twelve month.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
All right, I got to go, but give me thirty
seconds on this. The one hundred school building projects that
have been put on hold, how many of them is
because they're bespoke and cutting edge and expensive versus how
many are actually full in the mold part.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Of it, big part of it, hopelessly local, lots of customization,
lots of best spokeness, and what we need is standard classrooms.
You can sex it up around the outside with some
better landscaping for sure, but actually, for goodness sake, let's
just do things in one way, same way, every way,
standardized way, get the cost down and you'll have a
better quality buildings across our school infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Appreciate your time, Christoph Lax and the Prime Minister. I'd
recommend you go listen to yesterday's press conference one because
it was became a bitch fescet after a while. But
more importantly, when a Prime minister talks about a grouping
of people, i e. Health that spends thirty billion dollars
a year and you've got people, whether're on the board
or the executive, that literally cannot find what's spent, where
(10:01):
it's spent, how it's spent, why it's spent. This country
is buggered.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Listen live to News Talks it' B from six am weekdays,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
Tuesday morning. Prime Minister Christopher Lection's, well, it's very good
morning to you.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Good morning, Mike.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Now, I've got a lot of wastage going on. I
hope you're aware of this. Are you up on the
New Zealand Film Commission? And there are many and varied
parties that the taxpayer is funding.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
A little bit yep, what do you want to talk about?
Speaker 1 (00:17):
The part that it's allowed to happen and when does
it stop?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I'm sorry, I just said it again, the.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Part that it happens and when does it stop?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
The Film Commission?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Have we got a bad phone line or something.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
We might do? Sorry about that. You're breaking up a
little bit, but yes, you start again.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Okay. The Film Commission are hosting parties for people who
are leaving, and they're hosting parties for people who are arriving,
and it's costing us tens of thousands of dollars. Is
that acceptable?
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Well, again, I'm not aware of what they're doing exactly
in terms of their operational details. They're trying to attract
people to actually do projects here. We've got a good
amount of projects coming into New Zealand, which is good
for our our industry inter sector here that's been a
good thing. I'm not exactly sure what's appropriate or what
level they've been doing hosting and trying to attract projects
(01:07):
to New Zealand. I think it's good that they do
do that.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
But when a CEO arrives and they say let's have
a party for an arriving CEO and they spend eight
thousand dollars doing that, is that typical of the public service?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Well, that wouldn't seem appropriate to me. I mean, I
think you want to be able to have high level
engagement to welcome a CEO and to talk about the
project they want to get involved with. When I was
in California, for example, when I met with Apple, they
want to do a number of productions here in New Zealand.
They don't need a party for that. They just need
to know that I'm aware of what's going on, and
I'm encouraging them to choose US over Ireland or Yugoslavia
(01:40):
or some other place to do the project.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
So is there a message from the government top down
going to the government departments that we're not having parties
and they're unacceptable, or has that message been ignored or
was there no message at all?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
No that message is being applied on a regular basis,
and I've made it really, really clear. I'm expecting every
single public sector CEO to deliver within their budgets. You
would have seen us make big interventions on say Health
New Zealand recently Housing New Zealand, disability services. When we
give you a budget, we expect you to deliver it
and manage within the funds that we've got Health to Blasic, right,
(02:14):
thirty billion dollars to spend a year, sixteen point seven
billion going more in and then all of a sudden
the deficit emerges because there's very poor financial control and
understanding of what's going on. Unacceptable. That's why pro Commissioner
and so I think, you know, the message is pretty clear.
I don't know. I make it clear every day of
my interactions with CEOs and different officials about what we're
expecting to do, you know, And you imagine there'll be
(02:36):
some dumb stuff that happens, yes, and people want to
make sure that that's corected very very quickly. Right.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
What about the thirty three million that the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and Trade it project it nearly tripled in
cost since it started in twenty twenty one. It's been
a failure for all of its existence and the wider
ministry was made aware of it before millions of dollars
more were misspent. How does that happen?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, yeah, we'll come away. That's project that was i
think was picked off under our journ government and there
was over spending in there, and there's been interventions made
from the top of impact to make sure that's gripped up.
And when St Peter's Minister Foreign Affairs was briefed about
it and he's laid little down pretty firmly, and obviously
it don't quite a change happening as a result of that.
(03:18):
So you know, again those are the things that are happening.
I mean, there is literally in public spending important that
they understand that it's taxpayers money. They have to be
spent really prudently and you spend it as if it's
your own money, as if you actually do your own
family budget. So we're building that culture back into Wellington.
We have to build it back in But yep, that's
a good example of project that's overrun and it can't
(03:39):
be let If projects are over running, we want that
surface very quickly. We want to know about it, and
we wanted more an action plan to get it back
on track again and on time.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
So what's your observation of this? And this comes out
of your POSTCAB press conference, which once again I waited
my way through for forty minutes yesterday, as you did.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I appreciate you listening to that, I really do.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
I mean, you're telling us yesterday that members of boards
and exis, KISS and Health couldn't get basic financial information.
I mean, yes, is that possible?
Speaker 2 (04:08):
I don't know. That's why we've made the interventions we
have because when you told everything's five and then it
finds out, you find out there's actually not very good
cash flow analysis. There's twenty one different accounts, payout systems.
You know what actually happened, Let's be honest about it
was a really botched merger. We've seen it now in
TPOO King and we've seen in disability services. We've seen
(04:28):
it in KO, We've seen it in Health New Zealand
where actually when you remember mergers and acquisitions, well, if
you buy a new company, you really quickly identify the synities,
get out the duplication, make sure it's embedded properly into
the organization and you build a proper organization. In this case,
twenty one DHB is basically carried on big slack of
big layer of management over the top of it, and
(04:50):
no financial reporting and literacy to the board, provided to
the board, and the board not able and didn't ask
questions about information they needed to know. And so no
longer a bod, no longer a Gevin, a commissioner with
very big powers to actor and move very very quick
in less to leving and he'll be great. I think
you might have had him on the show, but you know,
he's a pretty straight talker. And I meet with him
now with Nikola Willis Shander Media, myself and him and
(05:13):
his commissioners, and we go on a regular meeting to say, right, oh,
what is happening this week, what are we doing, and
what are the challenges that you're encountering with In a
matter of a week and a bit Low and behold,
for the first time there's been in decent cash flow analysis,
which is when you're trying to run a large organization
eighty five thousand people, thirty billion dollars worth of spending
and more money coming into it, it's kind of a basic.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Right yea, it is. I just despair it what you're
having to deal with. Then I'm reading yesterday about the
National Disaster Coordination System, right, so a COP a common
operating platform. So New Zealand's latest attempt to build a
COP was abandoned weeks ago. The country lacks even a
proper foundation for one spatial data infrastructure, is what we're
talking about. This is despite Cabinet ordering an SDI to
(05:57):
be built in twenty fourteen, saying it would boosts the
economy by billions of dollars, organizations didn't want to share
their data. Not only has an SDI never been built,
the National Geospatial Office, which has only ever had two
or three people in it any way, folded in twenty eighteen.
And we wonder when it rains why the same crap
happens over and over and over again.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Data management is a major major issue, right And if
you don't collect the data, you can't analyze it, and
then you can't take action on it. And it's not
about just collecting data. You've got to have action and
insights from that data that then changes the way you
do things. And so you're right, whether it's in the
spatial planning space and land that we know that floods
and doesn't flood and then is consented at a local
(06:41):
government level. Frankly, whether it's things in the way that
local governments respond to common systems around emergency management. We
were very fortunate in christ Church that christ Church and
Seal and why Mack had the same system to deal
with porthills fires. But actually across the country sixty two
different district councils have different systems and so but in
(07:02):
government I don't personally believe is very good at building
IT systems. Are the right people to do that stuff,
and we do too much customization. We should take off
the shelf products in the digital space because we're meaning
billions and billions of dollars on IT projects and so
we're trying to get our hands around that as well.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Cheers, there's a report this morning. You've set aside too.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
And want to depression Mike.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
It's like they feel sorry for We have great.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Potential, but we have to sort this mess out and
this is what we're going to do. This is a
turn when I say turn around job, this is the
stuff that I'm talking about, and this is why New
Zealanders can't take good management for granted. You know, you
can have all the slogans you want, you can talk
all combined are much as much as you like, but
you've actually got to run stuff well and deliver it well.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
You've set aside two hundred and sixteen million, it's reported
this morning, contingency on these heat to tobacco products is one.
Is that true? If you've set aside two hundred and
sixteen million, as in the money you won't be getting
and it helps thirty seven thousand people, that's thirty thousand
dollars per person. Is that worth it?
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, there was a few things going on there. One
is there's a new category of products called heated tobacco.
You know, there's a whole bunch of new innovations in
that space. It's not you know that better products, we
believe for you than people being on cigarettes. We know
what vaping's done to lower smoking rates. If there's another
way in which we get people away from cigarette, that's good.
So we don't actually formally know what the growth of
(08:24):
that sector will look like over the next twelve months
or so. Having said that, we put the maximum contingency
away in case and what we've done. Is what we've
done is have the excise tax on those kind of products,
so there's still excise tax being paid. But we're trying
to incent people to move away from cigarette so we
can get our daily smoking rates down to five percent.
I've gone down from eight point six to six point eight.
(08:44):
We think we're actually on track to deliver smoke free
twenty twenty five, which is the five percent daily smoking rate.
And we're going to try it for twelve months and
let's see how it goes and put a review in place.
But we put maximum money aside from a contingency point
of view, not knowing what the uptake ultimately of these
products will look and feel like. Currently it's low, and
then we'll review it in twelve month.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
All right, I got to go, but give me thirty
seconds on this. The one hundred school building projects that
have been put on hold, how many of them is
because they're bespoke and cutting edge and expensive versus how
many are actually full in the mold part.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Of it, big part of it, hopelessly local, lots of customization,
lots of best spokeness, and what we need is standard classrooms.
You can sex it up around the outside with some
better landscaping for sure, but actually, for goodness sake, let's
just do things in one way, same way, every way,
standardized way, get the cost down and you'll have a
better quality buildings across our school infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Appreciate your time, Christoph Lax and the Prime Minister. I'd
recommend you go listen to yesterday's press conference one because
it was became a bitch fescet after a while. But
more importantly, when a Prime minister talks about a grouping
of people, i e. Health that spends thirty billion dollars
a year and you've got people, whether're on the board
or the executive, that literally cannot find what's spent, where
(10:01):
it's spent, how it's spent, why it's spent. This country
is buggered.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Listen live to News Talks it' B from six am weekdays,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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