Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Chris Finlayson said "This is an important project that not only ensures the secure storage and preservation of these important records, but through digitisation will help make the living history contained in the archives more readily accessible." However, in private the money was also seen by some as a contingency fund. The archive had been concerned about taking on the cost of redundancy provisions that the former RNZ Sound Archives staff had under their RNZ employment agreements. Employment contracts at the New Zealand Film Archive did not have redundancy provisions.