An excellent bill

Melissa Lee had drawn from the ballot, a bill called Broadcasting (New Zealand on Air and Te Māngai Pāho Reporting Requirements) Amendment Bill.

It is in fact a very useful bill to give taxpayers more transparency over programmes we fund.

It basically requires NZ on Air to publish every quarter data on how many people viewed a programme they funded. This includes TV and radio ratings plus online views. Also the costs of the programmes (this is already disclosed).

What this will allow us to see is basically the cost per viewer.

Number of viewers are not the only metric of success. But it is something we deserve to know. If a TV show costs say $500,000 and the average number of TV viewers is 1,800 then one could well conclude a cost per viewer of $300 is not value for money.

So I hope this bill gets supported by Parliament. Surely no party would vote against transparency.