Posts by A S
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Speaker: How is Government evaluating…, in reply to Michael Fletcher,
Great post, Michael. You raise some very important questions on these changes.
I also agree with you that the welfare reforms don't seem to have improved W&I job matching capability. I also wonder if the churn figures around returns to benefit would tell an interesting story about the sustainability of the reported benefit exits.
Do you think the dissolution of CSRE (and the broader move away from doing much, if any, evaluation of effectiveness across government) may have led to a situation where MSD simply don't have the capability to carry out an evaluation of any significant size?
Reading about the opaque responses you received to requests for the evaluation information does make me wonder if they may be running into issues of how to evaluate the changes in a credible way.
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The trade union is thus the mortal enemy of the charismatic leader ..
In this particular case it seems that the trade union is the mortal enemy of the trade union.
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The saddest bit is that whatever happens with the Hobbit, all sides have to work together again at some point, simply because the industry here is so small.
Fingers crossed that when the dust settles, and despite all the acrimony things aren't irreparably damaged in what must be a very tight knit community.
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Soldiers get court-martialled for not following orders. From boot camp, they have it pounded into them that they have to follow orders, no matter what they think about them personally.
From my limited understanding, I believe that U.S. troops are allowed (are almost expected to in some cases) to refuse to obey illegal orders.
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Now you can call me crazy if you must, but am I the only person who thinks it's no accident that Turia had to front this shitstorm (and did a pretty good job, IMO) while Sharples was nowhere to be seen?
It sounds more likely that Tariana is fronting this because she is the one that Hone spun a line too. She and Pita are CO-leaders after all, which might be another perfectly rational reason as to why she is dealing with it....
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Must correct you there. According to Treasury, government appropriations amount to about 5% of TVNZ's income.
With the Charter removed, almost all of that in the current year is the $18 million to run and produce programming for the two digital channels, which stops in just over two years.
TVNZ will get some of the contestable funding, but most of that goes to independent producers.
By comparison, Maori TV gets $51 million in public funding. Which I don't have a problem with -- but it does show the vastly different situation of our two national broadcasters.
Russell, I'm not sure that is quite comparing apples with apples. MTS gets funded in a different fashion than TVNZ, with funding for programme production being included in that $51million.
Perhaps a fairer comparison would be to exclude the production funding that MTS gets, or add the 65% (around $48million) of the $73 million that NZ on air provided to TVNZ in 2008 for producing programmes.
Also, you asked earlier
Why on earth should it? TVNZ has had to walk away from one major sporting event after another -- most recently the Commonwealth Games -- because it not only has to pay its way, but pay the government a dividend every year.
It was MTS that brought public money into the bidding war, in a questionable way, and MTS CEO Jim Mather who refused to discuss a joint bid.
Sorry, work gets in the way of replying during the day. My, perhaps not very well made point was that after watching TVNZ (and TV3) happily going along with stories about the use of govt $ by MTS, and to then come up with an even larger bid using those same taxpayer dollars, seems just a little bit off.
Claiming the moral highground and then doing exactly the same thing you've accused someone else of stinks. We would call politicians on doing that, amd we should call SOEs like TVNZ on it too.
As Audrey Young's article(s) notes, the MTS CEO, Jim Mather, does also seem to have come out fairly strongly to say that the whole joint bid line of argument is perhaps not quite as the MSM has made out.
In fact, the collective writings of Audrey Young on this whole issue have been pretty damn illuminating, and tell a much more nuanced story than pretty much anything else I've seen in any other media.
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I guess that would depend on how many business/tourism opportunities or jobs for Maori TVNZ is proposing on generating from their additional funding.
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I think your beef should be with the Government, rather than TVNZ
When TVNZ comes out and says thanks, but no thanks to the proposed additional cash to put their revised bid in, I'll happily agree with you.
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It's proposing to fund the production of "hundreds" of TV programmes to support a venture Te Mangai Paho says it doesn't want a part of. I think they could have told Cabinet about that.
It is only proposing to do that in amongst a pretty broad range of other things, a lot of which seem to fit the Maori development bill.
The in-fill production mentioned doesn't seem to feature prominently, and to me (and based on the total amount of funding involved and the sheer range of calls on that funding as presented in the paper), it looked more like funding for a few infomercials, which probably goes to show how much I know about broadcasting production.
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Just in relation to
It's grand, audacious and, hey, maybe crazy enough to work. But TPK really needs to tell Cabinet if it's going to be a broadcast funding agency.
and
The sad thing about this whole saga is that you're right Russell, the development fund clearly isn't for this sort of project.
I think the important distinction here is that from my reading of the paper republished in the Herald, TPK wasn't getting into broadcasting, it would have been purchasing a broad (maybe overly broad) range of Maori development opportunities/outcomes.
Achieving that range of outcomes (or even a proportion of the intended outcomes) would pretty much exactly fit the bill for what that funding is intended to do.
>rant<
While I personally couldn't care less about NZ hosting the RWC, the MTS bid did look like a genuine chance for Maori to actually get some domestic and maybe even international exposure in terms of Maori culture, and an opportunity for Maori to showcase themselves economically and socially, rather than continue to be stuck in the tokenistic dancing natives routine that this country routinely pigeon holes Maori into.Seeing the MTS getting shafted by TVNZ apparently to keep the redneck masses happy and ensure that 'teh ma-oris can't make us watch their channel' must be a bit hard to swallow for Maori throughout NZ today....
<end rant>