Board Appointments
July 26th, 2008 at 8:29 am by David FarrarThe Herald picks up on the stacking of half the new Transport Agency board with Labour affiliated politicians.
In the last few months almost every Labour Party activist in the country seems to be picking up taxpayer funded board jobs.
Now I have never advocated that those with political involvement and experience should be ineligible for board appointments. And in some cases it can be useful to have a board member with some political saavy. And likewise it is understandable that a Minister will want perhaps one or two people on the more critical boards who understand politics to the degree that they can help the Board avoid actions which will put them on a collision course with the Government.
And being realistic, if a Minister has several candidates of equal quality, then the one personally known to the Minister will be at an advantage.
Now having defended some appointees with a political background, why am I critical of the latest rash of appointments? No not just because it is Labour. I will give some guidelines I think all Governments should use, and that National also has broken in the past.
- Never have those with political connections forming a majority or even close to a majority on a board. That threatens good governance. National was guilty of this in the 1990s when I think every single member of the Lottery Grants Board was National connected. Now sure that only doshes out money but it is a very bad look. If a board has more than a couple of persons with political connections, then it loses credibility.
- Unless someone was already a professional company director (or widely seen as possessing similar skills), they should not be appointed to more than a couple of boards. An individual should not have so many appointments that they earn a close to or higher than six figure income from board appointments. The appointment of Di Yates to four separate boards is an example of that. If they put her on only one board, no-one would probably grumble (except her fellow board members) – but four boards is ridiculously venal.
- Appointees must bring genuine value to a board – their appointments must be based on merit, even if they have political connections. Appointments are always somewhat subjective but there are some clear differences in competence. For example I wouldn’t criticise the appointment of Garry Moore to the Transport Board as he has significant governance experience. But I can’t see how the appointment of Christine Caughey is in any way based on merit. The same for Di Yates on on Food Standards Authority – they were so desperate to justify it they had to include living in Waikato as a credential.
- The more important a board, the more critical it is that the apointees be top class. I don’t get particularly worked up about an appointment to the Waikato Sports Trust or the Lottery Grants Youth Committee etc. But the boards of the large SOEs are critically important, as are the top regulatory boards. The Electricity Commission has been stacked with Labour affiliates – which is a massive concern. And this week I have focused on the Reserve Bank Board – a prime example of a board which needs the highest calibre of appointees, and those who can bring some real value to the area of monetary policy.
No-one should think a National-led Government is never going to appoint some of its former MPs, or others politically connected, to various Boards. Of course they will. But if appointments are in line with my proposed guidelines, then they should face significantly less criticism.
Related posts:
- Other Board Appointments
- Auckland CCO appointments
- Two new National Board members
- Hawke’s Bay District Health Board
July 26th, 2008 at 9:11 am
I’ll lay odds that the moment National appoints anyone to a board that there will be a leftist outcry that the person appointed is unsuited to the duties. Do I have any takers?
All Board appointments should be examined by the relevant select committee, imao.
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Agreed Grant.
David – is there an expectation that the bludgers (sorry, Labour appointees) will tender their resignations upon a change of governemnt?
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 9:32 am
They can have real influience.
Vote:Mike WIlliams is on the board of Transit NZ. He is a strong believer in Smart Growth and so mobility and efficiency are now way down on the list of priorities. IN fact I don’t think they get a mention.
July 26th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Wayne Donnelly was/is dealing with these bludging f*cker?
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 9:55 am
perhaps the information should be more widely publicised. I find it quite interesting that there are no guidelines already in place. Is it just another hidden ‘banana-republic’ aspect of NZ politics?
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Grant Michael Mckenna, yes, you are right on. It’s the same the whole world over. Socialist politicians do it, “good’, conservative politicians do it, “bad”. Conservatives being decent people, they tend to end up giving ground all the time and “yielding to public opinion” and of all the appointments to Supreme Courts and boards and Quangos, etc, etc, over a long period, by far the greatest majority will have been made by Socialists, of Socialists, for the Socialists.
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Owen McShane, also dead right, as usual. A whole host of issues have been deeply politicised, with buzzwords like “sustainability” used as cover. As usual, the OUTCOME of the resultant policies and regulations in the real world, will be most damaging to the exact same people who socialists claim to “represent”.
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 10:17 am
GMM at 9.11. When the Supreme Court Bill was being considered in Committee I made a submission including this recommendation – for appearance sake & for credibility of the System – that every judicial appointment should be considered independently by the Select Committee representing the Parliament.
Vote:Lord Cooke who was also a presenter that morning thought it was a ridiculous idea. Was it? He gave no reason.
July 26th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Lee C, good suggestion. Now if we can just get the media to co-operate and provide the glare of publicity that would wise the people up………I’m not holding my breath………
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 11:06 am
By the way, would someone please post Mccully’s latest on here? I think it’s called something like “A Tsunami of Cronyism”. Apparently the Heleban has made 140+ appointments in the last month, 40+ of them in the last week……….
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 11:14 am
I think the link you are looking for is this
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0807/S00480.htm
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Like it was always predictable. As soon as Klark grabbed power, it was clear that NZ’s plunge into the mire of of socialism would rapidly accelerate. All over the globe, socialist governments have always resulted in an increase in corruption and cronyism, and NZ is no different.
Democracy is under real threat from an alliance of union thugs, political cronyists, overpaid Klark sycophants, environmental Marxists, racists and a general assortment of crooks, thieves phonies, scammers charlatans and as always, completely backed up by their filthy lying partisan media buddies. We won’t get the exposes that we should be getting, because too many of the cronyists and gangsters involved in this scenario are working at TVNZ and other important information sources. Chavez knows how its done, and so does Helen Klark. They’ve read the same books, attended the same strategy meetings, and done everything according to the same master plan, and they know that without the media in their pocket, they’d never get away with it.
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Lucky then all those governance seminars/ courses that DPF has taken in the last few years make him into a totally qualified board member if national becomes the government.
Vote:Lets hope too that unwanted people like Clem Simich are given a nice cushy appointemnt of two , based only on their personal and professional qualities of course.
July 26th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Brian Gaynor has a very well crafted piece in this morning’s N.Z. Herald. He is critical of Lianne Dalziel’s appointments to a securities board. There do not seem to be any political appointments, but the quality of the appointees is not good.
Vote:Gaynor has zeroed in on why Kiwis invest in housing rather than productive activities.
July 26th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Re Lee C @ 9:55am – I’m not sure what kind of guidelines you mean, but the State Services Commission publishes Board Appointment and Induction Guidelines: http://www.ssc.govt.nz/board-appointment-guidelines … in their papers to Cabinet’s Appointments and Honours Committee, Ministers must certify whether they have complied with these guidelines or not.
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
And all ghostie can do is smear. Sad really.
Vote:July 26th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Thanks, “chfr”. It’s too good not to copy and post here:
http://www.mccully.co.nz – 25 July 2008
A Weekly Report from the Keyboard of Murray McCully
MP for East Coast Bays
A Tsunami of Cronies?
“A tsunami of cronies? Maybe an avalanche? Whatever the appropriate expression, we surely are witnessing one of them right now.
It is established constitutional convention that governments do not make appointments to boards and public bodies in the three months before an election. But as we draw close to the three month cut-off (assuming the election will be as late as Clark can make it) the appointments are spewing out of the Beehive as fast as the Governor-General can sign them. Indeed, another week like this one and poor old GG Satch will be fading away due to the inability to get a meal break.
As at Thursday evening there had been 43 government appointments this week. Yes, 43 appointments in four days. That’s part of a tally of 140 in the past five weeks. So, on the assumption that Clark is intent on an 8 November election, we can brace ourselves for another full week of Labour Party flunkies receiving their unjust rewards.
Anyone who has held office in a trade union or a Labour Party branch appears to have sent their updated cv to Wellington. Clearly any Labour lackeys who haven’t been appointed to something by the end of next week must be seriously out of favour.
Over at the New Zealand Transport Agency (the result of the merger of Land Transport NZ and Transit) they will be able to form their own Labour Party subcommittee of the board. Labour Party President Mike Williams has found time around his other public appointments (GNS Science, Genesis Energy, OnTrack, ARTA) to take on a directorship. As have Labour Party lackey and former mayor of the United Socialist Peoples Republic of Christchurch, Garry Moore, and former Labour Party deputy mayor of Wellington Alick Shaw.
This week also saw long time Labour activist and former Labour Wellington City Councillor Sue Piper appointed to the board of Te Papa. As if her roles as chair of the Local Government Commission, Quotable Value NZ and the Law Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal were not enough.
The appointment of new directors to the Growth and Innovation Advisory Board (GIAB) this week provided further opportunity to reward the richly undeserving. The nation’s top unionist, NZCTU President Helen Kelly, has been appointed to the board, along with former UK Labour MP Brian Gould (also a TVNZ director). And Deloitte’s chair, Nick Main, who has been doing the Clark Government’s bidding over the Emissions Trading Scheme as chair of the Business Council for Sustainable Development, receives his reward in the form of a GIAB directorship. Reappointed for a further term were left-wing economist Brian Easton and former Labour candidate David Shand, already appointed chair of the Tertiary Education Commission, a director at Meridian Enery and a member of the Royal Commission into Auckland Governance.
But there’s more. Labour Party hack and former Clark staffer Chris Eichbaum has been appointed to the board of the Reserve Bank. Former lefty mayor Yvonne Sharpe, fired by the voters of the Far North, has picked up a job as a member of the New Zealand Conservation Authority to add to her role as chair of the Road Safety Trust. All of the above on top of the four Government appointments worth $80,000 for former Labour MP Diane Yates (see mccully.co of 11 July 2008).
The Cabinet Manual (6.9) makes it clear that there is a convention that government appointments should cease in the period before an election. “In practice, restraints have tended to be applied from about three months before the general election is due…” But whether adherence to the Cabinet Manual is a particular priority for the Clark administration is now in question.
When she signed the foreword to the most recent edition of the Manual, it was deemed to be “authoritative,” and, according to Clark, “successive governments have endorsed the Cabinet Manual as a sound, transparent and proven basis on which to operate.” However this week, asked to explain the degree of flexibility she was prepared to allow her Foreign Minister to depart from the Manual’s very clear requirements regarding the receipt of gifts, Clark told the House “the Manual is not a rule book, it provides guidance.”
So on that basis, while the growing tsunami of cronyism might point to a November election date, we should not draw conclusions based upon the naïve assumption that our Prime Minister will adhere to the strictures of what was previously accepted as unbreakable constitutional convention, but has now been down-graded to a piece of mere “guidance”.”
Vote:July 27th, 2008 at 4:49 am
Maybe Garry Moore aws rewarded for not demanding that Christchurch receive equal treatment to Auckland and Wellington. In fact Canterbury has yet to receive any of the additional funding it is entitled from regionally allocated portion of the petrol tax despite being the most poorly funded region in the history of the petrol tax. In the twentieth century Canterbury managed to lose one-third of the money it payed into the road fund, this year it will lose 55%. This is despite Transit’s travel time studies revealing that travel time delays are worse in Christchurch than in any of the other urban areas in the study.
This stacking of the board of the new transport agency should come as no surprise. Heads began rolling at Transfund and Transit in 2000 when the government discovered that these agencies had committed most of their forecast revenue for the next three years to maintenance and major safety oriented projects leaving little for increased spending on public transport. Also not surprising, since the heads of these agencies were key members of the National Road Safety Committee, ministerial staff were forced to rewrite the Road Safety to 2010 Strategy to remove it’s suggested target of no more than 150 road deaths in 2010 and to correct it’s “lack of balance” in the presentaion of the enforcement and engineering “options”. They only became options when the target was amended to the more “realistic” 300 deaths in 2010.
Not that this would have had anything to do with the decision to subsume Transfund within the LTSA of course.
So now the 4th Labour government’s reorganisation of land transport has re-reorganised back into it’s original National Roads Board form, with the addition of other forms of transport being granted open slather on the revenue from roads.
This Government needs to be reminded of Mr Savage’s comment during the debate of the resolution to introduce the petrol tax: “At the present time we are discussing a form of taxation upon motor-vehicles for the purpose of raising money for the upkeep of our roads.” 31 Oct. 1927, Hansard p453.
Vote:July 27th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Wasn’t one of the requirements that you lived in the correct place. i.e. Dianne Yate’s is the perfect appointee to the Food Standards Australia New Zealand board because she comes from the Waikato – NZ’s ‘bread bowl’.
Apparently.
Vote: