Kiwiblog

Congrats to Craig Foss, who has been appointed Minister of civil defence, racing and senior citizens plus associate minister of local government and commerce.

Craig replaces John Carter who will be resigning in the next few weeks from Parliament to become High Commissioner to the Cook Islands.

Tags: Craig Foss, John Carter

Audrey Young writes at the Herald:

The strong performance of National candidate Hekia Parata in the Mana byelection has boosted her chances of being promoted this week.

It certainly has not harmed it. And the fact the PM did not announced last week the new Minister night suggest he was waiting to see how Mana went.

Ms Parata, a former public policy and Treaty of Waitangi consultant, not only slashed Labour’s majority, but performed well under pressure and ran a strong team.

Counting against her is that she is a first-term MP. Her promotion ahead of the class of 2005 could put some noses out of joint.

The leading contenders in that pack are Craig Foss, the MP for Tukituki and chairman of the finance and expenditure select committee, and Chris Tremain, MP for Napier and the chief Government whip.

I think both Craig and Chris know that their ascension is a matter of when, not if, which would help molify them if Hekia jumps ahead of then. But having said that, 2010 is far preferable to 2012 in terms of ascension.

What may count against them this time is that if they are promoted, then there has to be a minor reshuffle. While Hekia can slip in and take over Pansy’s portfolios directly.

Selwyn MP Amy Adams, in the same cohort as Ms Parata, is also tipped for future promotion in a commerce or economic role.

Or Agriculture. Or Justice. Amy is multi-talented

Mr Key could save a little money by appointing no one to the Cabinet and appointing another minister outside the Cabinet. He could make an even bigger saving by appointing no one at all and upsetting no one.

This is the only error in Audrey’s article. If the PM makes no appointment at all, this will in fact upset every single Backbencher. Reducing the size of the Ministry means more people competing for fewer places. A smaller Ministry is regarded by backbenchers with the same loathing as teacher unions performance pay.

Personally an Executive of 28 is larger than we need. However the time for change would have been when first forming the Government, rather than doing it by attrition.

But that would suggest Mrs Wong’s role was surplus to requirements in the first place.

Well …..

Mr Key is not seen as a slave to “political correctness”; he is not oblivious to gender and identity issues in National’s line-up either.

It is a factor, but not the sole or even the dominant factor.

The importance of the Mana byelection is that a promotion would be seen on the basis of talent, not tokenism

Yes, a promotion would be seen as gained on the basis of performance.

Making one appointment outside of the Cabinet to take over Mrs Wong’s two portfolios makes most sense, and of the contenders, Ms Parata’s sphere of interest is best suited to the vacancies.

We may find out later today who it is.

Talking of Mana, kudos must go to Phil Quinn who predicted a Faafoi win by just 1,000 votes.

Tags: Amy Adams, Chris Tremain, Craig Foss, Hekia Parata, Ministry

Just looked at new website for Craig Foss and Chris Tremain – their Backing the Bay site.

The joint site to brand them as the regional MPs is good (and they have done that for some time),but also their use of Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and You Tube. And an RSS feed of course.

Tags: Chris Tremain, Craig Foss

Whanganui had a 3% lead in the party vote in 2005, and this expanded out to 22% in 2008. And the 3,500 majority for Borrows goes to 6,000.

Rangitikei sees a 25% lead in the party vote and Simon Power moves his majority from 9,000 to 11,000.

Tukituki has an 18% lead in the party vote, and a 2,600 majority for Craig Foss gets a boost thanks to Labour’s sacking of the local District Health Board to over 7,000.

Palmerston North has been held by Labour since 1978. The party vote was narrowly won by National but Labour’s Iain Lees-Galloway held off Malcolm Plimmer by 1,000 votes.

Wairarapa has National 17% ahead on the party vote. And John Hayes turns the seat safe with a 2,900 majority converting to 6,300 in 2008.

Otaki was a huge battle. I’ve door knocked Otaki in the past and it is not natural National territory in the Horowhenua parts. So winning the party vote by 8% is good for National after trailling by 3% last time. Darren Hughes put up a huge fight to protect his sub 400 majority but Nathan Guy grabbed the seat by almost 1,500.

In Wellington, Labour does a lot better starting with Mana. Labour remains 6% ahead on the party vote but reduced from 18% in 2005. Winnie Laban’s 6,800 majority shrinks only slightly to 5.300.

Rimutaka was the last hope for NZ First. Labour won the party vote there in 2005 by 11% and in 2008 by 0.3%. On the electorate vote just as narrow with Labour’s Chris Hipkins pipping Richard Whiteside by 600 votes. Ron Mark got a credible 5,000 votes but stll trailed by 7,000.

Hutt South is home to Wainuiomata and Trevor Mallard. Trevor delivered a party vote margin for Labour of 4% and a 3,600 majority for himself. In 2005 the party vote margin was 14% and the personal majority 6,600 so some movement there.

Rongotai is now the home of the Labour Deputy Leader. But even before her ascension, Rongotai gave Labour a massive 11% margin on the party vote – 43% to 32% for National. And her personal 13,000 majority in 2005 was only slightly dented to just under 8,000. If that is her low tide mark, she’ll be happy.

Wellington Central saw in 2005 a party vote for National of just 33%, Labour 43% and Greens around 16%. In 2008 it was National 36%, Labour 34% and Greens around 20%. Marian Hobbs had a 5,800 majority and Stephen Franks cut that to 1,500 against new MP Grant Robertson with some Green party votes giving Robertson their electorate vote to keep Franks out.

Ohariu was assumed by almost everyone to be safe as houses for Peter Dunne. But it got close this time. First on the party vote, National beat Labour 43% to 40% in 2005. This time it was 47% to 33%. On the candidate vote Peter Dunne dropped from 45% to 33% making him vulnerable. National’s Katrina Shanks lifted her vote from 21% to 26% and Labour’s Charles Chauvel from 26% to 30%. The Greens candidate got 7% of the vote and may have ironically saved the seat for Dunne.

Tags: Annette King, Charles Chauvel, Chester Borrows, Chris Hipkins, Craig Foss, Darren Hughes, Election 2008, Grant Robertson, Hutt South, Iain Lees-Galloway, John Hayes, Katrina Shanks, Malcolm Plimmer, Mana, Marian Hobbs, Nathan Guy, Ohariu, Otaki, Palmerston North, Peter Dunne, Rangitikei, Richard Whiteside, Rimutaka, Ron Mark, Rongotai, Simon Power, Stephen Franks, Trevor Mallard, Tukituki, Wairarapa, Wellington Central, Whanganui, Winnie Laban

Winston has been attacking the media for several weeks alleging they have their facst wrong, the Herald editor and political editor should resign in disgrace etc.

So you would think Winston would be careful when he accuses others of wrong-doing. But no displaying the same wrongness he accuses the media of, he targeted Craig Foss:

Mr Peters attacked National MP Craig Foss, tabling Companies Office records in which Mr Foss was listed as owning 2,524,750 shares in Cynotech Holdings.

Mr Peters questioned why Mr Foss’ shareholding was not listed in the Register of Pecuniary Interests in which all MPs are required to declare their financial interests.

Hmmn, well this could be an issue. But …..

In a statement to Parliament, Mr Foss, said the shares were registered in the name of the Foss Family Trust, and this was included in his disclosure of interests.

He also tabled a statement from the share registry confirming the trust had owned the shares – worth about $423,000 at yesterday’s prices – since April 2003.

So if we use Winston’s own rhetoric, shouldn’t he apologise and resign as he kept demanding the Herald do? I suppose the difference is the Herald story was true.

Peters also targeted former Green MP Ian Ewen-Street:

Mr Peters, who has come under hard questioning from the Green Party over the donations, also brought up the case of former Green MP Ian Ewen-Street and his partner Sue Grey.

In 2003, Mr Ewen-Street stood down from a select committee inquiry into the scampi industry, citing potential conflict of interest after he began a relationship with Ms Grey, who was a lawyer appearing before it.

Yesterday, Mr Peters described it as “improper behaviour”.

Now on this issue, Peters is correct that it was improper behaviour. I said so at the time:

I’m shocked that Green MP Ian Ewen-Street absents himself from hearing evidence on the Scampi inquiry due to a conflict of interest, yet took part in the final deliberations.

Considering the conflict of interest was that Ewen-Street was rogering the lawyer for one of the parties, I’m amazed he felt he could take any part at all in the deliberations.

But two wrongs do not make a right. The actions of Ewen-Street in 2004 do not mean Peters can do what he likes in 2008.

Tags: Craig Foss, Ian Ewen-Street, MPs Register of Pecuniary Interests, Winston First

Tukituki MP Craig Foss has been blogging a series of documents about the HB DHB, released under the OIA. These deserve some critical scrutiny.

The latest is fascinating.

• 14 months before the DHB was sacked, Peter Hausmann was suggesting future appointees to the Minister
• He was proposing a way to stop the Board Chair being elected to the Board
• He suggests an Ian Wilson be appointed Deputy Chair
• Ian Wilson, was appointed as Chair of the Review Panel which coincided with the Board being sacked

While WIlson may have been unaware Hasumann was promoting him, it certainly shows that Hausmann was plotting against the democratically elected Board for a long period of time, and presumably having a receptive ear in the Minister who eventually sacked them.

Tags: Craig Foss, David Cunliffe, Hawke's Bay DHB, Ian Wilson, Peter Hausmann

For that long Sunday afternoon:

The NZ Book Council have a very cool website to encourage reading. They’ve done it as a Windows operating system.

Scrubone does a fisking of No Right Turn’s outrage at National over citizen juries. Also on that issue, Russel Norman at Frog Blog agrees with some of my suggestions around Citizen’s Juries – specifically the need for multi-partisan agreement not narrow agreement.

Paul Walker responds to Matt McCarten’s hysteria over the Business Roundtable.

Whale Oil likes his stats comparison with Kiwiblog. Obviously girls and guns work

Craig Foss looks at how Dr Cullen is financing his tax cuts – he is borrowing $6.4 billion and also selling $6.4 billion of financial assets breaking one of his four tests. This last one is particularly cunning as it allows him to claim gross debt remains on track. This si why net debt is the better indicator.

Colin Espiner reviews the Reserve Bank MPS and the polls.

Bernard Hickey believes Alan Bollard has gone soft on inflation, as does the Westpac Chief Economist.

Tags: Alan Bollard, Bernard Hickey, Blog Bits, Citizens' Juries, Colin Espiner, Craig Foss, inflation, Matt McCarten, Michael Cullen, No Right Turn, NZBR, Paul Walker, Reserve Bank, Russel Norman, tax cuts, Whale Oil

Craig Foss has some fascinating information on the Hawke’s Bay District Health Board sacking. One justification for the sacking was an allegation board members doctored minutes of an audit committee meeting. But, who really did the doctoring? Read what Craig says:

In this case the minute taker, who is also the HBDHB Internal Auditor, took notes, wrote up the draft minutes and sent them to the Audit Committee Chair and CEO for review prior to the draft minutes being sent to the other Audit Committee members.

This is normal practice in most organisations – the meeting chair and CEO see the first draft.

Then began a series of email exchanges between the minute taker and senior management. Essentially senior management challenged the first draft of the minutes, suggesting they needed to have significant changes made to them. The minute taker, who is also the internal auditor, resisted this and said that the minutes should reflect a balanced record of the proceedings. The minute taker stood his ground, and in the end it was suggested that if management wanted to make significant changes they should raise these concerns at the next Audit Committee meeting when the minutes were to be approved.

Now here you get into a real area of concern. The internal auditor was correct to stand his ground, if he did not feel the changes management wanted would fairly reflect the meeting.

The correct course of action would be for the senior management to talk directly to the meeting chair (who is the officer who legally has to sign off minutes after ratification by the committee) and discuss with the Audit Committee Chair any concerns they had over the minutes.

Even more disturbing is the fact that this is the Audit Committee which has a special role in scrutinising how management perform, and that senior management are trying to change the minutes without discussing it with the Audit Committee Chair.

Independent to the above, the draft minutes with some changes but nothing major, made by the Audit Committee Chair, were sent to the other members of the Audit Committee and CEO. That should have been the end of the discussion. But, an additional set of minutes, never seen by the Audit Committee Chair, that included changes made by senior management were sent direct to Minister Cunliffe, who then used them as evidence to sack the HBDHB.

Management do not have the power to change minutes. It is grossly improper. And in this case it seems these doctored minutes were produced by senior management against the desire of the internal auditor who actually was the minute taker for the meeting.

It is not clear of the Audit Committee formally ratified the minutes at their next meeting, but that is what should happen – the committee itself testifies as to their accuracy.

The first the HBDHB members knew of these “new” minutes was when they were released as part of the Ministers HBDHB sacking media pack labelled as “Document H”.

This sound like juicy fodder for the judicial review. It also sounds like a strong reason why the Auditor-General must review the management of the District Health Board.

Tags: Craig Foss, Hawke's Bay DHB

Donna Chisholm in the SST quotes from an Audit Office report on the Hawke’s Bay District Health Board. Now I can’t find the Audit Office report online, but it doesn’t look great for the Government which has effectively sided with Peter Hausmann and the management, by dismissing the entire Board.

Chisholm states the Audit Office reports finds the following:

• There was a contract to Wellcare Education, a subsidiary of Hausmann’s company Health Care New Zealand, for a pilot project to train 16 long-term beneficiaries as homecare workers in a partnership with the Ministry of Social Development.
• A total of 11 failings were found in the process.
• The $1.1m contract included a $256,000 payment to Wellcare, over two years. Board members say they have never been able to establish the reason for this.
• Management kept the Board unaware that the contract had been proposed until one month after it had been agreed and signed – despite the fact it involved on of their own board members
• It is understood Hausmann’s discussions with senior staff about the contract began as early as August 2005, six months before he declared his conflict of interest.
• The contract processes did not comply with either the board’s procurement policies or public sector good practice and there was no evidence of formal conflict of interest procedures being undertaken.
• Management could not explain why an open tendering process had not been used.
• No reasons or justifications for the selection of Hausmann’s company were recorded in files.
• The contract was signed without evidence of a completed approval process.
• Payments were made before services under the contract were delivered when they should have been tied to milestones which reflected completed work.

Now bear in mind this is only a report into the $1.1 million contract. We are yet to see the report into the $50 million contract.

UPDATE: Local MP Craig Foss has several relevant blog posts on this issue, citing board minutes and written questions about the fact the contract was not tendered, and how the CEO told the Board initially it had been.

Tags: Audit Office, conflicts of interest, Craig Foss, Hawke's Bay DHB, Peter Hausmann

I’ve not had time to do as detailed a post as I would like to on this, and the media have covered the issues well.  So I’ll just ask a few questions:

1. Why would the Minister not sack the Capital Coast DHB (which would probably be met with universal support) but instead sack the HB DHB – something the local community is dead set against?
2. Isn’t it rather perverse to go public with anonymous criticisms of the Board by anonymous surgeons, and then complain when the DHB Chair responds in the media also?
3. Will the majorities of local National MPs Chris Tremain and Craig Foss increase by 25%, 50% or 100%?
4. The Govt is trying to suppress the draft report and the former DHB members the final report.  Why not release both the draft and final and let the public form their own views.  Plus lets face it – they will both end up on the Internet anyway I suspect.
5. Why is the Government apparently punishing the DHB for acting to prevent a conflict of interest in a contract, when the Auckland DHB got lambasted by the High Court for not being diligent enough in dealing with conflicts of interests?
6. Why did Annette King appoint someone to the HB DHB when it was known he was likely to bid for a major contract off them?
7. How bad is it for the Government to have the local Councils taking the Minister to health over the sacking?
8. Has a doctors union ever before praised a DHB Chairman? Don’t they normally refer to all Chairs as cheap bastards who won’t pay us enough.

I look forward to seeing both the final report and hopefully the draft report.

Tags: Annette King, Chris Tremain, Craig Foss, Dvid Cunliffe, Hawke's Bay DHB

Cactus Kate celebrates the Hong Kong Government giving out NZ5.5b of tax cuts because they took in too much tax.  And that is on top of the fact the top marginal tax rate is 17%.

Craig Foss is outraged over the sacking of the democratically elected Hawkes’ Bay District Health Board after just 72 days in office.

Liberty Scott has the top ten reasons why lefties should hate Castro.

Russell Brown covers the issue of some favourable parliamentary edits in Wikipedia to National MP’s pages. I agree with his conclusion that if you do more than one or two minor edits you should register a profile rather than just do it from your IP address.

A friend gave me an article in New Scientist a couple of weeks ago, about how political persuasion may have a genetic basis.  They found identical twins has more similar political views than fraternal twins, which is quite fascinating.  I had been planning to blog it, but Kiwiblogblog have covered it with links to an extract of the original research.

Daily Tech finds that a 12 month drop in world temperatures has wiped out a century of warming.  From what I can tell this doesn’t mean that human activity is not contributing to warming, just that other factors such as solar activity still have far more influence. Comments from those more up to date with the science here are welcome.

Tim Selwyn at Tumeke has a post on Oliver Driver’s interview with Helen Clark’ and how she seemed unsure how to handle questions criticising her performance not from a right wing perspective but from the left. He also compares how Helen Clark was unable to come up with a single nice thing to say about John Ke, while Key had no problem supplying an admirable quality of Clark’s the previous week. If someone can get the Alt TV interview onto You Tube I’ll link to it.

Tags: Alt TV, Cactus Kate, Climate Change, Craig Foss, Fidel Castro, Hawke's Bay DHB, Helen Clark, Hong Kong, Liberty Scott, Oliver Driver, Russell Brown, tax cuts, Tim Selwyn, Wikipedia