A select committee’s forensic examination of TVNZ shows 60 staff at the state broadcaster earned above $200,000 a year, with nine over $400,000, and at least $6 million paid out in performance and sales bonuses last year.
The numbers are disclosed in the annual examination of TVNZ by the social services and community select committee, and issued just before TVNZ announced the axing of current affairs show Sunday, Fair Go, and a total of 68 staff.
TVNZ is now in the middle of a consultation process on its planned cuts, with staff launching a public campaign to save the programmes and news and current affairs jobs.
Answers to the MPs’ 195 questions also show that TVNZ pays for 76 Koru Club memberships for the Air New Zealand lounges at airports and the highest individual travel cost was for ‘presenter/reporter’ who ran up $100,000 in bills.
The performance bonus and incentive payments table requested by the committee reveals 188 individuals received sums ranging from up to $5000 (90 staff) to $310-$320,000 (2). Eight were above $220,000. The minimum spend on the payments would have been just over $5m.
In addition, the TVNZ sales team shared $1,122,480 in contracted sales incentive payments in the 2022/23 year.
Information on how many staff fall into each $10,000 salary band lists 60 being paid above $200,000 and nine over $400,000 – with the highest, presumably the chief executive, being between $840,000 and $849,000. Another response however lists the payment during that year to the CEO of $777,622, presumably because one chief left and the role was filled by an interim executive.
TVNZ paid a total of $564,000 for public relations and communications staff in the year, the highest for the past five years.
The 76 memberships the company pays for the Koru Club are for “front line presenters and news camera personnel”.
In another answer, TVNZ tells MPs it has remedied its gender pay gap from a negative 4.6 percent for women employees overall to now be positive by 1 percentage point.
TVNZ employs around 700 staff now, down from around 735 for the period covered in its select committee responses, and set to fall by 9 percent if all cuts proposed this month are adopted.
RNZ’s responses
The other, non-commercial and much smaller public broadcaster, RNZ, faced the same questions from the committee and disclosed more contained spending on salaries, bonuses and PR.
RNZ discloses a total staff of 350.
It spent $123,168 on performance bonuses and incentive payments or additional leave in the year, with 22 people paid a bonus under $5000 and one paid between $65,000 and $70,000.
Its top paid employee, presumably the chief executive Paul Thompson, earned between $430,000 and $439,000 and RNZ had 13 people earning higher than $200,000 a year.
RNZ also reported its gender pay gap was now marginally favourable to its female staff.
RNZ spent $106,772 on catering in the year, covered by its entertainment and hospitality policy for such ‘sensitive expenses’. And its total travel bill was $854,464, up from pre-Covid numbers around $500-$690,000, and likely to have been influenced by costs of covering major weather events early last year.
Stuff holds on as No 1 for news in online audiences
Stuff has weathered the upheaval of introducing a new website and app and redesign, with complaints about its user experience and navigability, to remain at No 1 in February for news websites.
During the month, daily audience tracking seen by competitors showed Stuff dipping noticeably and there was speculation, including from the NZ Herald media column, that Stuff could lose its position above the nzherald.co.nz site.
Peculiarly, Nielsen did not release the February figures on schedule last Friday, the 15th of the month, as is usual – the figures not emerging until overnight Tuesday. One industry figure said it appeared the initial Stuff numbers had to be re-checked on request.
Stuff did drop, from 2.34 million unique users in the Nielsen monthly measurement in January to around 2.21 million for February but its loss was not the nzherald.co.nz ‘s gain, with the number two site dipping from 1.95m users to just on 1.9m – stubbornly below the coveted 2 million mark.
RNZ’s site was up to around 1.15m for the month from 1.02m in January, just edging Newshub, which fell from 1.1m to just above 1m, amid the turmoil of the announcement that its entire news operation, including the site, was to be closed from the end of June.
Stuff was evidently relieved at holding onto the number 1 spot. In a story on its site on Wednesday headlined “Stuff still New Zealand’s number one news website”, it talked up its website redesign and the “replatforming” project behind it.
