RNZ job cuts: 'Our staff and the public deserve better' - union

No final decisions on job cuts at RNZ should be made until the next government is formed, says the union for media workers.The public broadcaster is facing sweeping job cuts after shock revelations the company lost nearly $12 million dollars, with plans to axe the equivalent of nearly 60 full-time jobs.Chief executive Paul Thompson said internal reports gave an inaccurate picture of the finances, and management only found out about the size of the loss in October.RNZ also broke the law by setting up a $5 million overdraft without approval from ministers and the board is commissioning an independent review to find out what went wrong.E tū - the union for media workers - said RNZ staff had already been through voluntary rounds of redundancies and as a result many teams were running short as people who left were not replaced.It said 18 people had chosen to leave."Our workforce is already feeling significant pressure from job losses and the loss of so many more jobs will make it even harder for us to meet the needs of New Zealanders and provide the stories that need to be told," Auckland-based RNZ journalist and E tū delegate Melanie Earley said."Our staff and the public deserve better," she said.E tū director Amy Hansen said the country did not yet know who the next broadcasting minister would be, and RNZ had enough money in reserve to get through this year."There's no need to rush," she said."This government has cut RNZ's funding two years running and signalled more cuts to come. Decisions about RNZ's future shouldn't be made while the country waits for a government."Get the review done, find out what went wrong, and hold off on cutting jobs until there's a government in place to make decisions about public media."New Zealanders trust RNZ more than any other news outlet. That trust was built by the people who work there. Don't make them pay for someone else's mistakes."Cuts will 'impact the quality of the product' - commentatorMedia commentator and Newsroom website co-founder Mark Jennings told Checkpoint that the revelations from RNZ on Monday were a "complete shocker".He said he expected new RNZ chair Brent Impey to be "absolutely furious" over the news, and that it was hard to fathom how the executive and senior management were caught out by the financial shortfall.Jennings said both staff morale and the product itself would suffer under the proposed cuts, with a "decent chunk" of the cuts inevitably coming from the news operations."Chopping that many people out of a newsroom will really impact the quality of the product."I think that at a time when the whole media is retracting and lots of people have looked to RNZ as sort of a safety net around that, that's going to have a major impact when they start whittling people out of the newsroom."With Thompson already leaving at the end of this year and former chief financial officer Hilary Parker resigning unexpectedly in early October, Jennings said he expected other executives would be following them out the door.Jennings said he was not sure why an independent review was even needed."Brent could go and find out exactly what's gone on within a few minutes, really. I just think that's another kind of expenditure that RNZ doesn't really need."He said he was puzzled by the silence from the rest of the finance team."It's not just one CFO who has access to the finances, in an organisation of the size of RNZ, there would be four or five - or even more - finance people, what were they doing, were they just sitting quiet?"What is it, that people don't speak up when they're scared?"