Radio New Zealand is in trouble

News broke recently that Radio New Zealand incurred a $12 million deficit for the finanical year to 2026 because of accounting issues.

The news surfaced yesterday, but problems were foreshadowed when the former Chief Financial Officer suddenly resigned on October 2, and an emergency board meeting was called.

The deficit must have been known for some time. It is referred to in the Annual Report which was published yesterday. This document would have been months in preparation.

There would have been an urgent analysis of the situation, and some understanding of the amounts involved would have been worked out.

And under the no suprises principle the relevant Ministers, David Seymour and Paul Goldsmith would have been told.

Three issues were noted in the annual report:

• Budgeted revenue included $2.0m for land sales incorrectly accounted for as revenue in the Budget.
• Personnel expenses for FY26 increased by $3.2m against budget including $1.4m of redundancy payments
• Operating Expenses for FY26 increased by $6.4m against budget. This included $1.85m of costs related to the Auckland office relocation, $1.1m of assets written off in relation to the old Auckland office and Henderson site, $1.0m of costs relating to the decommissioning of the Henderson towers in preparation for the sale of that site to NZTA; and $1.7m of remediation costs associated with the sale of the Titahi Bay site.

As you can see most of the loss related to property matters. Given that RNZ is shortly to receive $51 million from the sale of the Henderson property, and there was a $11 million increase in its book value, the problem does not look so big.

As for the deficit itself there are options to deal with the problem.

Radio New Zealand could go cap in hand to the government and asked for more money. I suspect the answer would have been no, but we are at the caretaker stage where no decisions of this magnitude could be made.

RNZ could delay making a final decision until the new Government is in place and then see what assistance could be given. Although the Government’s previous actions in shaving off $5 million of Crown funding for RNZ shows what the response would be.

RNZ could choose to do nothing at this stage and see if it could use the $51 million it is shortly to receive from the sale of the Lincoln Road site to NZTA to see if it can adjust over time to get out of the situation.

But instead of holding off, it has announced mass redundancies. The old saying about never wasting a crisis springs to mind. New Chief Executive Brent Impey would have been hired to cut costs and now there is the perfect reason to do so.

Radio New Zealand will be a much weaker version of itself following this decision.

This is a bad time for New Zealand broadcasting and media, the cries of panic appear to be overstated and it’s a sign of what we can expect during the second term, presuming National wins.