Above the Fold: On Monday, the biggest Māori screen production company faced down the biggest funder of Māori content at the High Court. It was an incredibly tense moment – then, just as quickly, it resolved. Duncan Greive breaks down a strange day in the screen sector.
Yesterday morning, Māori screen production giant Bailey Mackey sounded tense but determined. He spoke exclusively to The Spinoff in the moments before heading into the High Court in Wellington, applying for a judicial review of the way the government’s Māori content agency Te Māngai Pāho dealt with funding applications. Mackey described it as “unfair, inconsistent and lacking in transparency”. It was an extraordinary situation, less for the allegation than the parties involved.
Comments
Good on you Bailey… if you thought TMP had a problem with Transparency…, try the NZFC where there is no staff contact list, where the Leadership Team displayed on the website includes people who no longer have jobs there, and where no staff emails and certainly no phone numbers are disclosed, and where apparently applicants are now told ‘we don’t engage in phone conversations, all corres will be by email’.
And the NZFC definitely, does not disclose to any applicant any reasons why they were declined, nor the names of the assessors. And management also decline to disclose the names of assessors to the Board who are asked to sign off on Staff recommendations, without knowing whether the assessor was experienced or not.
But I also want to ask Bailey how an action he took to promote ‘Transparency’ reached a satisfactory resolution —which appears to prevent any ‘transparency’ at all about its conclusion?
Comments are closed.