Tony Ryall: crony

Last month National appointed former MP Tony Ryall as chair of the board of Transpower. It's a nice little retirement package for Ryall - he gets $98,000 a year from the taxpayer. And from documents released under the OIA today, it was pure cronyism: Ryall was appointed against explicit Treasury advice to retain the incumbent:


They go on:



In a section on "succession planning" they note that

With five relatively new directors on the Board it is important to manage succession carefully to ensure sufficient institutional knowledge exists on the Board, especially at a time when the company is in a transofrmative phase of its culture and business.

They recommended that Verbiest be retained as chair, and Ryall appointed as his deputy. They also recommended that "should you decide to retire Mr Verbiest" Ryall be appointed chair (clearly they could see which way the wind was blowing). The Minister, Todd McClay, chose the latter option.

If there's any future governance problems caused by Transpower's inexperienced board, we know who to blame. It would be nice if National treated SOE boards as something other than retirement sinecures for washed-up ex-MPs...

More cronyism

National has appointed former National MP Tony Ryall to chair Transpower:

Former Health Minister Tony Ryall has been appointed as the next chair of grid operator Transpower.

The appointment was announced by Finance Minister Bill English and State Owned Enterprises Minister Todd McClay.

Ryall is currently a director of Transpower and will take over as chair on November 1.

I guess National doesn't think that the gold-plated parliamentary retirement scheme is enough, so instead try and use public-sector sinecures as a bonus retirement package. It is an abuse of power and nothing more than theft from the public purse to line their own pockets.

Back to the 90's II

Another sign we're back in the 90's: massive protest marches against health cuts:

Up to 10,000 marched through central Dunedin at lunchtime today protesting the possible loss of neurosurgery services.

Starting in the Octagon, the protest was led by Dunedin Mayor Peter Chin and Invercargill mayor Tim Shadbolt, and finished with the crowd encircling Dunedin Hospital.

Mr Chin said he and the region's other mayors want to send a strong message to the Government that the proposal is not acceptable.

The protest follows an independent report's suggestion to put all six of the South Island's neurosurgeons in Canterbury.

10,000 people is almost 10% of the population. Like mining, people feel strongly about health cuts. And its not hard to see why: because one day, everyone is going to need to go to hospital for something. And they want that hospital to be close, not a five hour drive away.

If Ryall keeps cutting, there will be more such protests. And eventually, some of them will happen in electorates National cares about. OTOH, under MMP its the party vote that matters, and the vote of a grumpy person in Dunedin North counts just as much as one in rural Southland. And that means that widespread disgruntlement in predominantly Labour areas is still something the government needs to worry about.

Back to the 90's

As if public service cuts, mass-unemployment and beneficiary-bashing weren't enough, we now have another sign National has taken us back to the 90's: the CEO of Capital & Coast DHB resigning because they can't cut any more:

[I]n an email to staff explaining his reasons for leaving his $430,000-a-year job, [Whelan] said there was no more room to cut the district health board's costs, despite Government pressure to do so. "I cannot see where any more major efficiency can come from without negatively impacting on services."

Board members, including chairman Sir John Anderson, backed his statements, saying any further savings would "cut into muscle".

So much for Tony Ryall's repeated claim that there are no health cuts. This is a DHB which has come under horrific financial pressure by National to cut, cut, and cut, and can do so no longer. And they're not going to be the only one. My local DHB is so desperate it is looking for corporate sponsorship to meet its government-imposed budget shortfall. Others are shutting down services. But in the end, they're all going to end up in the same place as Wellington, where underfunding and cuts begin to impact healthcare standards. Assuming they haven't already.

Meanwhile, Ryall pretends none of this is happening. Practically every day in Parliament he is asked about the latest cuts horror story, and he washes his hands of them, dismissing them as "changes" and saying spending "priorities" are the responsibility of the DHB. This ignores the fact that their budgets are dictated to them by the government, which by giving them a sub-inflation increase (and much of it targeted towards meeting Ryall's preferred metrics so he can juke his stats) has effectively delivered them a whopping cut. National is running our public health system into the ground - just like it did in the 90's.

Pure incompetence

Recently I've been taking an interest in the processes government agencies have for handling and tracking OIA requests. The aim of this project is to find out whether it is possible to use agencies own internal tracking software to generate OIA performance statistics for government departments. But departments aren't the only agencies responsible under the OIA - Ministerial offices handle a large number of requests as well. So I've begun poking into them too.

From the responses I've had back so far, it seems the standard way Ministerial staff track OIA requests is via a spreadsheet or Word document, which records things like the date a request was received on, when a response is due, the requestor's name and address, the general subject of the request, and when a response was sent. Which is what you'd expect. Except that not every Minister's staff does this. For example, Tony Ryall's staff for the State Sector portfolio track requests coming in - but make no effort to track when responses were sent - or whether one was sent at all.

This is pure incompetence. How the hell can they tell if they're complying with the Act if they don't track this?

(I should add: Ryall's staff in the State Sector Health portfolio do things properly. Which invites the question: do these people ever talk to one another?)

The worry is that this could be widespread through Ministerial offices (at least one government department seems to have the same problem). And if it is, then its no wonder responses are regularly late.

National lied about health cuts

When National signalled health cuts and "spending discipline" in last years budget, they said the money would come out of bureaucrats and the "back office". Frontline services would be unaffected.

They lied. Thanks to National's cuts, my local DHB is looking at a $9 million deficit for this year. Which means job losses, and cuts to services:

Hospital beds at Horowhenua, Palmerston North Hospital's rehabilitation ward and sexual health and diabetes services could be chopped in MidCentral Health's attempt to claw back a forecast $8.9 million deficit this year.

Cuts to renal services and medicine budgets are also proposed in leaked documents from a district health board hospital advisory committee workshop last week.

These are all frontline services, not "back-office" functions. Cutting them affects patients, not "bureaucrats". As a result of these cuts, people will have to go to Wellington for treatment, or just go without.

This is what National does: cuts the vital services ordinary New Zealanders depend upon. And all so their rich mates can have another tax cut.

More OIA control-freakery

First we had Immigration Minister Jonathan Coleman demanding all "sensitive" OIA requests to his department are run by his office (and starting a witch-hunt when they are not). Now, the government's OIA control-freakery has been taken a step further, with Health Minister Tony Ryall making the same demand of DHBs:

District health board bosses have been told to run official information requests past the health minister, raising fears their independence will be undermined.

In a letter sent to all DHB chief executives at the end of June and obtained by The Dominion Post, Health Ministry staffer Oliver Poppelwell asked boards to supply Tony Ryall's office with copies of all requests under the Official Information Act, which allows the public and media to ask for information from any government body.

The minister's staff would also liaise with boards about the response "on occasion".

This is a gross abuse of power. DHBs are statutorily independent, and run by their own boards. They are responsible to the Minister for performing their functions, but the relationship is deliberately an arm's-length one. As such, the Minister's legal powers are quite limited: he can direct them to give effect to a particular policy, but not any specific act (so the Minister can't say "bump my mother to the top of the waiting list), and only by publishing a notice in the Gazette.

The reason for this demand is pretty transparent: governments and health ministers get hammered by any hint of poor performance in the health sector, a tactic used successfully by Ryall last term. Now he doesn't want anyone using it against him, and wants to cut off the flow of information which makes it possible. It is a purely political move, and directly contrary to the OIA's spirit of openness.

It wil be very interesting to see what the DHB's responses were, and whether their OIA policies have changed as a result. In the meantime, people have suddenly got a new list of things to OIA: they can ask Ryall every week/month for whatever he has been forwarded by DHBs, and any communications he made in response.

[Hat-tip: Tumeke, who has a way with words: "Tony Ryall wants to run the Eye of Mordor over any official information request in the health sector..."]