CLNZ CEO, Paula Browning pictured with Teacher’s Choice winner Mark Sayes of ESA Publications at Thursday night’s awards ceremony.
It’s hard to believe that a year has gone by since we were last here celebrating the best in New Zealand education resources. However if I look back at what the last year has involved at CLNZ, in the New Zealand creative industries and in the copyright world, it’s all been pretty full on!
In November 2014, CLNZ was still involved in a copyright tribunal reference with our universities over the licence fee paid for the use of copyright materials. A month later we were out of the Tribunal and had a new, world-leading, licence agreement in place. The world-leading aspect of this is no overstatement. No other collective management organisation with university agreements has a licensing framework in place to equal the one CLNZ has with Universities New Zealand. What’s so special about this agreement? It involves each institution implementing software that enables the electronic reporting of their use of materials under the licence every year. The outcome of this for authors and publishers is that every use of your work will be paid for, not only the uses that were picked up during the surveys that took place historically in the universities. These systems will come online progressively over the next year and we’ll keep you up to date with where we’re up to with them. I’d like to acknowledge Melanie Johnson, Copyright Officer at University of Auckland, who is with us tonight, for her advocacy and support of this significant change within the universities.
And so 2015 kicked off with 2 years of litigation left behind us and the prospect of being able to get on with business. We started with a survey of teachers to find out what content they are using in their classrooms and what would make their role of educating the next generation easier. The results of this survey have been shared with PANZ members and offered some valuable insights – the overall picture of which is that there’s no silver bullet in terms of content or format when it comes to trying to deliver quality education outcomes. However there was one theme that came through very strongly. And while I’m sure no one in this room will be surprised to hear it, it was great to see. New Zealand teachers like, prefer and want New Zealand resources. Unlike a Google search, New Zealand created resources can be trusted and they align with the New Zealand curriculum. In order to give teacher’s a chance to have a further say about the resources they like, we’ve added a Teacher’s Choice award to the primary, secondary and Te Reo Maori categories of tonight’s awards. Only the teacher’s votes counted here, so those of you who win these awards will know just how much those in the classroom value what you’re doing.
Another major piece of work this year involved the collation of the second edition of the Price Waterhouse Coopers economic valuation of publishing in New Zealand. We had some challenges with this in 2014 and we were sure 2015 was going to be so much better. But alas, no. So just like Steve Hansen does at half time in an All Blacks game when the first 40 minutes didn’t deliver the desired results – here’s my – let’s call it “encouragement” – for 2016. We cannot lobby the government and demonstrate the value of publishing in New Zealand unless we can quantify what the industry is worth. It would be ideal if we could do this using only publically available statistics. But the world is not ideal and in order to value our industry properly we need your co-operation. To those of you who did help by providing your financial data to PwC – my sincere thanks. To those of you who didn’t – for whatever reason – please rethink. The future of the government’s support for the industry – whether that’s in grants, support from Education New Zealand and New Zealand Trade & Enterprise or through our copyright law – requires that we demonstrate our contribution to the economy.
This is never going to be more important than it will be in 2016. During next year, the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment will complete their qualitative study of the creative sector prior to reviewing the Copyright Act. There is no government money being put towards quantitative valuation of the sector so each creative industry will, yet again, have to fund its own. Copyright Act reviews don’t come along every day. Our current Act is 21 years old – and while the majority of what we currently have works in practice – our chances of keeping it intact (if you look at what’s happened elsewhere in the world) are under threat. This is why we need the economic valuations and also why CLNZ, along with the Society of Authors and the Publishers Association, are members of WeCreate – the New Zealand creative sector alliance. And now I’d like to share with you a short story on why our creative industries, including publishing, are so important to New Zealand. http://wecreate.org.nz/about-us/2015-video-presentation/#1
