“I don’t care about that stuff and directors who have a fiduciary duty to the businesses that they are involved in also shouldn’t care about that.”
Except that the public sector directors did, and they still do.
And now Campbell has found out first-hand that the Government also gives a stuff.
When I reprised Campbell’s comments in a later column, the governors of some Crown entities and companies were quick to take offence. They pointed out that they had accepted strictures when they took on their roles. Prime among them was the requirement not to be seen to be political.
As one chair told me, they had also been presented with a fait accompli when they were asked to sign a letter that had been devised by public relations advisers, which they had not had input into. “I don’t sign such things,” they said, pointing out that doing so was hardly good fiduciary behaviour.
And as Campbell learnt this week, those strictures are also important to Cabinet ministers. They brutally took his scalp with the Prime Minister’s backing. Campbell had clearly broken the code, and this led to him losing the chairmanship of two Crown entities: Health New Zealand/ Te Whatu Ora, and the Environmental Protection Authority.
For Campbell, whose directorial portfolio has included the chairmanship of listed companies SkyCity Entertainment, Tourism Holdings and Summerset, this is a major fall.
He had forged a stellar reputation in the corporate world and was named Chairman of the Year in the Deloitte Top 200 awards in 2017.
He is highly intelligent and had the intellectual capacity combined with sufficient moral rigour for the Ardern Government to approach him to chair both Health NZ and the EPA in the first place. These were not roles he had to apply for.
It is trite to say he simply drank the Kool-Aid when it came to the Labour Government’s introduction of co-governance in the health sector and in all likelihood (according to Campbell) the environmental arena too. His critics argue that he lost his bearings when he scorned National Leader Chris Luxon’s replacement policies in the Three Waters arena.
But he not only supported co-governance measures, but passionately made the case for them in public, to business players and within government environments.
And then the game changed.
Chris Hipkins was a different political beast to Jacinda Ardern — direct, no-nonsense and determined to win the next election against all odds.
At the Beehive, it seemed that Campbell’s verbal incontinence had not just put a target on his back, but also the Government’s. At the Health Innovation Roadshow this year, Campbell talked about putting the health system through “rehab”. The speech notes — which he gave me — were vintage Campbell.
Karl Marx and John Lennon (and Paul McCartney) got a mention.
He quoted the Beatles song Revolution (with its lyrics on “the institution” and “you better free your mind instead”) as he walked through the institutional changes ahead and the creation of new agencies.
“Not bad, is it? Maybe we should have hired the Beatles rather than EY,” he said in the speech notes.
In retrospect, Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues would have been more apposite: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
Campbell has a deserved reputation as a free thinker.
But he has continued to dig a hole.
By going public yesterday with the shape of Health NZ’s restructuring proposal — which will likely result in the jobs of a large number of people being declared redundant — he not only created a political headache for the Government, but also for his former colleagues on the Health NZ board.
In an article for Newsroom, he said the “plan” would come with “the disestablishment of many hundreds of overhead roles”, which would allow Te Whatu Ora to shift “hundreds of millions of dollars from overhead to front-line expenditure”.
For a former trade union leader to put this in public so carelessly rather than through a managed communication is questionable.
There is really no immediate way back from this.
