Four people express shock in black and white cutouts against a pixelated money background. A headline reads: "Minister Paul Goldsmith has questions as NZ Film Commission slammed for ‘six-figure junket’ to Cannes.
NZ Herald headline, 15 October, 2024

MediaOctober 17, 2024

Breaking news: Things cost money

Four people express shock in black and white cutouts against a pixelated money background. A headline reads: "Minister Paul Goldsmith has questions as NZ Film Commission slammed for ‘six-figure junket’ to Cannes.
NZ Herald headline, 15 October, 2024

The NZ Film Commission has been caught red-handed spending money, doing its job of promoting NZ films to people who might want to buy and fund NZ films.

There’s nothing like a good slamming. 

The New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) finds itself flat on the mat after a king hit from the nation’s heavyweight champions of slamming, the Taxpayers’ Union (TPU). 

As headlined by the Herald, arts, culture and heritage minister Paul Goldsmith has questions about the NZFC’s “six-figure junket to Cannes”, which was revealed via a TPU Official Information Act request. The cost “does seem excessive”, said the minister, “but I’ll have to get the details.”

“It’s not unreasonable, I would have thought, to go to international film festivals, but obviously spending needs to be appropriate,” Goldsmith said.

Based on its recurrent use in headlines, six-figure anythings are seldom appropriate. Six-figure salaries are quite bad, but six-figure junkets are the absolute worst. The implication is just lounging around right there in the word itself —  a junky waste of time where junky pigs have their junky snouts in the junky troughs. 

Based on the headline on the TPU’s press release, “Film Commission living it up in the French Riviera”, you would be forgiven for assuming the OIA revealed that the four film commission staff spent their days rolling around Château Louis XIII, smashing bottles of Dom Perignon over the heads of locals paid to serve Fiordland moose steaks while dressed as New Zealand’s picturesque landscapes, while nights were spent bowling wheels of Beaufort d’été into 20-feet-high piles of croquembouche resembling the Two Towers.

As revealed via an in-depth investigation by The Spinoff (reading the OIA response), the truth is far more boring but nonetheless shocking.

Things, as it turns out, cost money. The spending details are available for anyone to peruse – complete with individual receipts and calendar diaries – in the NZFC’s 47-page response to the TPU’s OIA request. The TPU made the request on August 6, and the NZFC responded in full on September 3.

The commission’s purpose is “to encourage and also to participate and assist in the making, promotion, distribution, and exhibition of films” as prescribed by the New Zealand Film Commission Act (1978). In the 2022/2023 financial year, the NZFC derived 22% of its $34.23m revenue from the Crown, while 69% came from Lotteries. 

The trip to Cannes, between May 11, 2024 and May 24, 2024, was for the world’s largest international film market and gathering of professionals in the film industry and cost exactly $145,354.81. 

A studio apartment at 32 rue Hoche in Cannes (Image: www.cannesrivierarentals.com)

More precisely, studio apartments were rented. Food, wine, beer and water was purchased for 270 guests over 10 days. France is not within walking distance of New Zealand and flights were required to get four staff to Cannes. Three rooms were rented at a hotel where a residence was set up for hosting and meetings over a week. Wifi was supplied. The four staff also ate food. Someone bought some muesli and, lavishly, some bog roll from the Monoprix on rue du Maréchal Foch. There were two lunches held, one for sales agents and one for financiers. More than 100 meetings, events and appointments are shown in their combined calendars. Staff met with film commissioners, film festival directors, heads of networks, producers and co-hosted networking events with Ireland, Taiwan, Singapore and India. If things cost money, you might say these things are the cost of doing business in an industry estimated to be worth $390bn by 2028.

Supermarket receipt included in New Zealand Film Commission response to the Taxpayers’ Union OIA request (p26)

This isn’t the first time the NZFC has been “slammed”. In July the Herald (again) reported that the commission had spent “$16,431 on CEO parties amid budget cuts”. The finer print revealed there had been four functions in total. The cost per head across those four events, including catering, staff, beverage, travel and venue hire, was $40.77. 

There is no reason why costs couldn’t and shouldn’t be reduced, especially on the first farewell for outgoing CEO Mladen Ivancic, which came in at $80 per head. Everyone in the public and many in the private sector have been going “line by line” through costs for months now as chill economic winds bite and costs escalate, but the creative and cultural sectors, which are not alone in requiring levels of public subsidy because of the size of the New Zealand market, seem to cop more heat. 

It’s almost as if some people resent the idea of people doing work on the public dime that might involve something other than being miserable in Wellington. 

When you look at the honest details of the spending supplied to the TPU, the “slam” isn’t so much that the NZFC has gone to town on the costs of doing business in the film industry but that, perhaps, they shouldn’t be there at all. That it was a bunch of luvvies larping about with Amal Clooney and probably the Illuminati, doing five-eighths of fuck all on the taxpayer dime. 

Worst of all, they did it in the sunny Riviera while the rest of us were here, our skin puckering as we sat in a wet and whiny puddle of misery, rocking in the dark, awaiting the dawn.

NZFC staff calendars for May 19, 2024 included in New Zealand Film Commission response to the Taxpayers’ Union OIA request (p40)

We don’t call prime ministerial trips with business owners a junket, we call it a trade delegation. Christopher Luxon has made a point of ramping up trips overseas after a period of border closure, describing the country as “very negative, wet, whiny and inward-looking”. Auckland mayor Wayne Brown has just announced he’s off on a trade trip to Brazil and China. That’s costing around $75,000, with one mayoral office staff member accompanying the mayor on each leg. No doubt, it will be spoken about as valuable. 

Trade experts and prime ministers have always extolled the value of being face-to-face with the people with whom you’re trying to build relationships. We don’t serve visiting leaders and diplomats a glass of water and a look around when they visit. People host business breakfasts with politicians not because anyone is especially dying for a catering company croissant or to hear about how dark it currently is, but because we’re weird social creatures who tend to do things like talk and sometimes even conduct business over food and drink.  

Perhaps when absorbing the revelation that “things cost money”, the important thing to remember is this: business people (C-list or otherwise) and politicians travelling = trade delegation and good. Film luvvies rolling around Cannes at what is both a festival and the world’s largest international film market and gathering of professionals in the film industry = junket and bad. 

Do not let words like “market” and “industry” or the basic and perfectly fine studio apartment accommodation blind you to the facts. Or the slam dunks. 

‘If you value The Spinoff and the perspectives we share, support our work by donating today.’
Anna Rawhiti-Connell
— Senior writer
Keep going!
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OPINIONMediaOctober 12, 2024

The Weekend: When did you stop listening to new music?

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Madeleine Chapman reflects on the week that was.

I will preface this newsletter by acknowledging that I have been old from the day I was born. I was born prematurely but was 10 and a half pounds. A friend once looked at a photo of me at two days old and said, “you look at least nine months old”. Ever since, I have been assumed to be older than I am.

But only in the past few years (I’m 30 now) have I felt genuinely old in the sense that I don’t know what’s going on. My partner – who is legally older but spiritually younger than me – will occasionally explain a TikTok trend, or play music that I’ve never heard but immediately enjoy. While she’s doing that, I’m finding myself inexplicably pressing play on a random Spotify playlist titled “The 2000s indie scene” and positively strutting to work in the morning.

There’s a safety in this bubble, and if I was more inclined to feel younger, I wouldn’t have Coast FM and Flava as the two most-used presets on my car radio.

But once a year, my bubble is unceremoniously burst when I’m made to read the lineup announcement for Laneway. Even with the recent shift to One Big Headliner (Charli xcx), I found myself shocked and troubled by my complete lack of recognition of virtually every other artist on the poster. I felt Old (capital O), and wondered whether I was doing myself a disservice by wilfully ignoring new artists. Beabadoobee, an artist I’d literally never heard of until Wednesday, makes music that is extremely up my alley. Why am I depriving myself of new music discovery, and when did it begin?

Growing up, I had so many older siblings that music genres and tastes were thrust upon me, namely rap, RnB, yacht rock and old pop. As a teenager, I realised there was a whole world of music that no one in my family was interested in and therefore felt bold and new: enter the 2000s indie scene. It became my fulltime job to find new music to share with my friends. I browsed music forums and went down deep Youtube rabbit holes searching for hidden gems. Bon Iver released his first album and I was all over it, having gotten hooked on a Youtube video of him doing a “MySpace session” in 2007. I collected white guys with beards who wrote sad guitar songs. Damien Rice, Ray Lamontagne and Iron & Wine were the holy trinity.

Then came the discovery of Cool Women (Florence and the Machine, Bat For Lashes etc) then more experimental pop and truly random small artists, until I was at university and reading the 2014 Laneway lineup and freaking out because it had genuinely all of my favourite artists playing in one day. Wow, I remember thinking, how impressive that they managed to get the coolest, most popular artists all in the same year. But was it really a stellar lineup or were there 30-year-olds in 2014 looking at the poster and muttering “this is all gibberish” like I was on Wednesday?

The 2014 Laneway lineup and my proud souvenir (Frightened Rabbit setlist)

I can basically pinpoint my musical curiosity cliff to getting a job. Suddenly music went from a hobby that took up a lot of time to something I needed in order to relax in small moments of free time. And in those moments, I wanted familiarity and comfort. That’s why, for the past eight years, my Spotify wrapped playlists have looked eerily similar, with a couple of new artists sprinkled in.

My relationship to music has changed. And while I don’t have a fear of irrelevance (being 55 when you were 12 really helps with that), I do miss the joy of finding a new artist to follow all on my own, or realising a new discovery has three prior albums and being overjoyed rather than filled with resignation. Maybe it’s impossible to revive that sense of discovery and the world expanding around you as a teenager and to try would only lead to disappointment. But I’m probably too young to have given up already.

Perhaps the Laneway announcements can be a guide instead of a youthful threat. I probably won’t go to the festival but I’ve saved beabadoobee’s albums to my library so that’s a start.

This week’s episode of Behind the Story (LIVE)

Chris Pryor and Miriam Smith are arguably New Zealand’s best observational documentary makers. After two award-winning feature-length documentaries (The Ground We Won and How Far is Heaven), Chris and Miriam turned their attention to the shorter form, and dived deep on home education – parents who teach their kids at home. The six-part series follows six different families approaching education in six unique ways. From a dahlia farm to a bus, to a simple living room, Home Education explores the many reasons parents choose not to send their kids to school. Chris and Miriam joined me, live from the series launch at The Spinoff offices, to discuss observational filming, the allure of conviction in beliefs and how making the show changed their own views as new parents.

Listen here, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

What have readers spent the most time reading this week?

Comments of the week

“I love this! In 1984 I was in the third form at Wainuiomata College and my teacher was Moana Jackson. As a class project that year, we made a short film – a sort of Jekyll and Hyde-type horror film. I was the producer. With exactly $0 budget, we shot it on location at the college but some of the filming was done at night which felt particularly grown-up. One of my favourite memories from school, thanks to an inspiring teacher.”

“How are we supposed to moon anyone if there’s some second, smaller, temporary moon? Do we need a second bum?”

“Thank you Shanti, I live on the hill above Surrey St and we were among the many self-evacuating like you in the early hours of Friday morning as water flooded through our house. We lived there in 2015 too, when I got an urgent phone call to come collect the kids from the St Clair primary school. This is the most authentic article I have read on the floods, perhaps you need to experience it. I agree the Council did a great job both preparing over the last few years and in advance of the rain and during it. Our house is damaged and we don’t quite know what will happen right now, still I have hope for my community going forward with the lovely people in your article.”

Pick up where this leaves off

Sign up for Madeleine’s weekly Saturday newsletterwhich includes more handpicked recommended reading, watching and listening for your weekend.