RNZ to cut up to 30 jobs as its government funding falls again

Radio New Zealand will cut about 25 to 30 jobs over the coming financial year, roughly a tenth of its workforce, after another reduction in the money it receives from the Government.

Staff were told on Friday 14 August. The broadcaster has reopened the voluntary redundancy scheme it ran in the 2025/26 year as the first step, with further changes to follow.

Chief executive and editor-in-chief Paul Thompson said the broadcaster had no choice. “We need to make further savings to remain financially sustainable and continue delivering on our public media charter for New Zealanders,” he said in comments reported by the Otago Daily Times.

He told 1News that “RNZ’s focus is to continue to do a great job for New Zealanders and minimise impact on content while making the organisation more efficient and sustainable”, and that the rest of the process would be worked through with staff.

The arithmetic behind the decision has been building for two years. In last year’s Budget, RNZ’s funding was cut by almost $5 million a year, about 7 percent of its annual appropriation, locked in for four years. That was a reduction of roughly $18 million over the period. This year’s Budget trimmed the baseline again, by about 2 percent, and the broadcaster has been told to expect reductions of around 5 percent in each of the next two financial years, according to the NZ Herald’s Media Insider, which first reported the size of the job cuts.

Three consecutive years of smaller budgets is the part that matters. A single cut can be absorbed by delaying equipment purchases, leaving vacancies unfilled and trimming travel. A cut that repeats every year for four years cannot, because the savings have to come from the same place the costs sit, and in a newsroom that place is people.

Some of the effect will be audible rather than invisible. The Otago Daily Times reported that Saturday Morning will move from two hosts to one, with matching reductions in its production team. RNZ has said it wants to keep the impact on content to a minimum, but a programme losing a presenter is a change listeners will notice on air.

The cuts also land during a gap at the top. Thompson leaves RNZ at the end of this year after more than a decade in the role, and the broadcaster has been recruiting a replacement. That means a chunk of the restructuring will be designed by one chief executive and carried out by another, which rarely makes a difficult process easier for the people inside it.

What has not been made public is which roles go. Voluntary redundancy leaves that partly to chance, since the people who put their hands up are not always the people an organisation would choose to lose. If enough staff do not volunteer, compulsory redundancies usually follow. Neither RNZ nor the journalists’ union has said publicly how many of the 25 to 30 roles are expected to come from the newsroom rather than from support and technical teams.

RNZ is not an ordinary employer working through an ordinary restructure. It is a designated lifeline utility under the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002, which gives it a statutory duty to keep broadcasting during an emergency and to carry official information when other channels fail. In a serious quake, a cyclone or a national power outage, RNZ National is the station civil defence expects people to be able to find. That obligation does not shrink when the budget does.

The broadcaster is also the last large newsroom in the country with no paywall and no advertising, which makes it the default source for people who cannot or will not pay for news. Its regional reporting, rural coverage and te reo Māori output are not commercially self-supporting and never have been. Those are exactly the services that get squeezed first when a newsroom has to find savings, because nothing about them shows up in a revenue line.

None of this is happening in isolation. New Zealand newsrooms have been shrinking steadily since 2024. Newshub closed that year, ending close to 300 jobs. TVNZ cut about 68 roles in the same period and Whakaata Māori cut 27. NZME removed close to 40 positions across the NZ Herald, BusinessDesk and Newstalk ZB in early 2025. RNZ itself sought voluntary redundancies last year when its funding was first trimmed. In July this year Stuff Digital proposed cutting eight editorial roles, a figure its union disputed. Last week MediaWorks was sold for $130 million to an Australian buyer that had walked away from New Zealand radio in 2024.

Media and broadcasting employment fell 5.3 percent in the year to March 2025, the sharpest drop of any cultural sector measured. The commercial side of the industry has been cutting because advertising money moved to Google, Meta and streaming platforms. RNZ has been cutting for a different reason, which is that Parliament decided to give it less. The result on the ground looks much the same either way, which is fewer reporters covering the same country.

What that adds up to is a slower, thinner picture of New Zealand. Council meetings that once had a reporter in the room now get a press release. Court lists go uncovered. Regional stories surface late or not at all. Those losses are hard to see because the thing that disappears is a story nobody ever reads.

RNZ has said the process will run over the coming financial year and that it will work through the detail with staff. The organisation has not yet indicated whether any programmes beyond Saturday Morning will change.

What do you think? Does public broadcasting deserve protection from budget cuts, or should RNZ live within the same constraints as everyone else? Leave a comment below.

This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂