Sunday 23rd October, 2011

Q+A interview with Martin Snedden & Paul Vaughan.

The interview has been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can be watched on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Q+A, 9-10am Sundays on TV ONE. Repeats at 9.10pm Sundays, 9:05am and 1:05pm Mondays on TVNZ 7

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MARTIN SNEDDEN & PAUL VAUGHAN interviewed by GUYON ESPINER

GUYON Thank you, Martin Snedden and Paul Vaughan, for joining us. We really appreciate that. We’ll start with you, Martin Snedden. If you had to rate yourself in terms of how this has been handled, what sort of score would you give yourself this morning?

MARTIN SNEDDEN – CEO RWC 2011
Oh, listen, it’s a bit hard for me to do that, but we are pretty happy with the way things have gone. I think New Zealand’s done a fantastic job of hosting – not just the fantastic team that I’ve got working with me, but the whole country. The whole country’s got in behind this and given us a hand, and that’s been fantastic.

GUYON Paul Vaughan, you take over the baton I guess sometime after midnight tonight. Looking at this, I mean, are there things that you think you could do better?

PAUL VAUGHAN – CEO RWC 2015
There's a lot of things I want to steal from here, not least... I mean, Martin’s done a fantastic job, and I’ll score him at least 10/10, and the fact that the whole of the nation’s been behind it is just outstanding. I mean, the stadium of four and a half million – he’s got a workforce of four and a half million, which is absolutely brilliant.

GUYON What do you mean by that?

MR VAUGHAN Well, everybody you meet is absolutely besotted by what's going on. I mean, to move things like your oyster season, to move your school term times is absolutely brilliant. I don’t think we’ll ever manage to achieve that, so we’ll never hit the bar as high as Martin’s done, but, you know, it’s just fantastic what you’ve done – the engagement with the fans, the people have been here has been outstanding.

GUYON Martin Snedden, how worried were you about the problems on opening night? Because for a while there, that looked like it could seriously derail things.

MR SNEDDEN No, I didn’t think so. I think it gave you guys plenty to talk about, but I was pretty confident with the work that had gone on behind that. I knew that what happened on opening night was really an explosion of enthusiasm that went probably further than anyone could have reasonably expected, and, yeah, there were some problems, and there were some people genuinely affected, but...

GUYON You kept your counsel, didn’t you? It must have been a bit tempting to actually wade into that one, because it could have actually had an impact on the tournament that you were trying to deliver.

MR SNEDDEN Yeah, but I had a lot of confidence in the people that have been involved in this and getting it ready, and, alright, you know, you have a bit of a blip on that night. But put it in the context of the whole thing – we’ve delivered 48 matches, more than 1.4 million have gone through the gates, hundreds of thousands have gone down to the waterfront in Auckland and been all over the country, and at the end of this, you know, there was one issue on the opening night, and the rest of the tournament’s gone brilliantly.

GUYON Paul Vaughan, there’s been a bit of controversy and a bit of discussion in your media in England about the whole financial structure of the tournament. Do you think that has to change? I mean, some talk about the All Blacks not being able to make 2015 because they simply couldn’t afford it

MR VAUGHAN Well, there's a distinctive difference between running the tournament profitably and actually making sure we make enough money for the world game, and then the second piece is about distribution of the funds. The IRB, of which all the unions are part of, must decide how it wants to distribute the funds and how it wants to invest in the game – whether it’s in first-tier nations or second-tier nations. And that’s not for Martin or I as a tournament organiser. It’s really for that group of people to actually decide how it wants to invest in the future of the sport.

GUYON So it’s not something that you’re going to get involved in at all? You’re not going to recommend or wade into that argument.

MR VAUGHAN No, not at all. I mean, I saw John O’Neill on TV this morning, and he was basically saying that they will be there – Australia will be there and the All Blacks will be there. So that’s what I’m keen to make sure happens, so I’ve got 20 of the best teams on the planet coming to England in 2015. And obviously we want to see the best rugby possible, and we want to make as much money as possible for the game, and then we’ll leave the investment decisions to the IRB.

GUYON I guess if you look at the economics for the average punter, they’re looking at the ticket prices – I mean, have New Zealanders been gouged a little bit here? $1000 ticket prices. I mean, it is out of the reach of most people, isn’t it?

MR SNEDDEN But that’s for the final, Guyon. If you look at the whole pricing balance across the tournament and the fact that we’ve achieved our ticket revenue targets, which tends to indicate the population has said, “Yeah, you’ve got it about right.” If you think we’ve sold, say, 1.4 million tickets, I think roughly 400,000 or 500,000 of those ticket went at somewhere around $15, $30, $45 dollars. Now, you know, that’s a pretty good deal for the experience that people have had in the stadia, so I think we got it right.

GUYON So there's this whole argument, I guess, that it’s just been over-commercialised and priced people out of the game they love – you don’t accept that?

MR SNEDDEN Not at all. I mean, there's the evidence there that that hasn’t been the case. If you now look at how people are assessing this around the country, I think our whole population thinks that they’ve been intimately involved in this tournament, both in terms of those people that have gone to the matches and the people elsewhere that have helped out with the festival and everything else that New Zealand’s done around the hosting of it, so, you know, I don’t accept that at all.

GUYON In terms of the business opportunities and the leveraging that we’ve heard a lot about, do you think that we’ve capitalised on that from an economic perspective?

MR SNEDDEN We’re probably not going to be able to judge that for quite a while, but what I’ve seen – and again this is not my responsibility, it’s more been led by the New Zealand 2011 office, Leon Grice and Briony Ellis and Alex Matheson – I think we have put ourselves in the best possible position we could do during the tournament to actually activate and catalyse opportunities. Now, hopefully the people that have been given those opportunities – the businesspeople – will be able to follow this up after the tournament and turn opportunity into reality.

GUYON Paul Vaughan, in terms of rugby expanding its sort of reach and becoming genuinely a global game, what's the next move, do you think, in terms of making that happen?

MR VAUGHAN It’s a very good question, but inevitably, I think the World Cup gives it a massive shop window to actually encourage new people to come into it. When we go to England in four years’ time, what will happen is that we’ve got a population of 60 million people, of which there's a vast majority that will follow football. But what we want them to do is engage with big events and actually try to convert as many as possible into the oval-ball game, and if we can do that in a sort of wider European basis for the smaller countries, it’ll help Japan in their development as they go towards 2019, then we’ll actually have achieved, I think, a lot.

GUYON So Asia is potentially one of the growth areas for the game, isn’t it?

MR VAUGHAN Oh, for sure, for sure. I think, I mean, it’s always been popular in terms of Hong Kong sevens and that sort of thing, but as China becomes more involved and Japan put on a fantastic show in 2019, then inevitably it’s a big shop window for Asia.

GUYON What is the global sort of audience for this sort of tournament? I mean, does it get much play in the States, and even in Britain? We’re rugby mad here, so it’s been all-encompassing, but what is the global reach of this?

MR VAUGHAN Well, I know in America that they’ve recently started to have very good live broadcasts on network TV through NBC, so that’s been working quite well for them, and I think this tournament’s being played out there, but obviously Martin would probably know more than I do in terms of the worldwide distribution.

MR SNEDDEN Anecdotally, I picked up the other day off the French television people that are here that the audience in France watching their matches is somewhere between about eight million and 10 million, and I imagine for tonight’s match, it’ll be significantly larger than that. Now, you know, for that to be happening week after week, and throw in with that all the colour stories that their media are sending back to France about New Zealand, it’s got to have been a fantastic profiling opportunity.

GUYON Do you worry that if the All Blacks lose tonight, all this hard work, that people will only remember that it’s another World Cup that we didn’t win? I mean, how much is riding on tonight?

MR SNEDDEN No, I don’t... I think it’s already been established that the people have loved the Rugby World Cup experience, both in New Zealand and that’s also the international feel. So I think the success or otherwise of the tournament’s already been established. I think there's a difference here in that the international world loves what's happened, New Zealanders love what's happened, but we just want the icing on the cake, and that’s tonight, you know. That’s the chance, I think, to cement this whole event in the history of New Zealand in a really special way. So obviously from a selfish point of view, I’d love the All Blacks to win, because that’ll further enhance how people think about the whole event.

GUYON And I guess it would help your cause, would it, if the All Blacks were the defending champions when you host the tournament?

MR VAUGHAN I don’t mind either way. France being the defending champions – you know, they’re a short train ride away from England, so it’s pretty good from our point of view in four years’ time.

GUYON And this talk about New Zealand not being involved in the tournament when you host it, I mean, that’s surely not going to come to pass, is it?

MR VAUGHAN They’ll be there. They’ll be there.

GUYON They’ll be there?

MR VAUGHAN For sure.

GUYON We’ve heard a bit about this Business Club. The minister was talking about it before. Can you talk us through why that’s important and how that’s worked?

MR SNEDDEN Well, I think if we go back to the commercial model of the tournament, we knew from the moment that we went into this that we were making a significant dollar loss, so that loss is looking somewhere around NZ$39 million, NZ$40 million. The key to that was turning that into an investment in New Zealand, rather than just a straight-out loss on a rugby tournament. So hence all of the leveraging activities that have been done off the back of the platform of the tournament are incredibly important, and the Business Club’s part of that, where the NZ 2011 office – with our assistance, because we have direct access to a whole lot of the people from overseas that have purchased the tickets – gathered in their interests, found out what they wanted and tried to link that up with business communities in New Zealand, and put the two of them together on a consistent basis through the tournament. And from my observation, they’ve done exactly what they were meant to do.

GUYON Just before we leave it, can I ask you what now for Martin Snedden? I mean, you must have had your head in this for months and years. Come tomorrow, what...?

MR SNEDDEN Come tomorrow, I’ll start questioning to Paul Vaughan, saying, “How are your ticket sales going? And why haven’t you reached your ticket targets yet?”

MR VAUGHAN (laughs)

GUYON Alright, we’ll leave you to answer those questions at a later date, but thank you both for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

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