Former MP Stuart Nash. Photo / Warren Buckland
OPINION:
As we say goodbye to 2023 and welcome in 2024, it’s a good time to catch up on the very best of the Herald columnists we enjoyed reading over the last 12 months. From politics to sport, from business to entertainment and lifestyle, these are the voices and views our audience loved the most. Today it’s five of the top columns from Kate MacNamara.
After crashing out of Cabinet in disgrace on March 28, former Labour minister Stuart Nash will take up a new private sector job on Monday: Wellington-based commercial director for staffing agency and global recruiting consultancy Robert Walters.
Should you be in any doubt about Nash’s new role, Shay Peters, chief executive of Robert Walters Australia and New Zealand described it to the Herald this way: “Stuart Nash will be working closely with senior leaders across the state sector to alleviate challenges they are experiencing as they overcome the current skill shortage. He will provide solutions that will enable them to hit their productivity targets, ensuring the delivery of services NZ Inc. needs.”
Yes, that’s the same Robert Walters which is almost undoubtedly the largest supplier of contract labour to the New Zealand public sector.
The same Robert Walters which supplied $64m of contract labour and recruiting services to the 10 public service ministries and departments which spent the most on contractors and consultants in fiscal 21/22, the last year for which there is public data.
The same Robert Walters which supplied $11.2m of such labour to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), a large swath of which was presided over by Nash, as Minister for Economic and Regional Development.
The same Robert Walters which supplies its services to the public sector under the All-of-Government contracts that are developed and managed by MBIE’s government procurement division.
And yes, that’s the same government procurement division that was a main portfolio responsibility of, you guessed it, the Minister for Economic Development, until recently, Stuart Nash. Read more >
Buried in the Water Services Entities Bill passed last December and followed by three more pieces of legislation - the last of which will revise the first - is a comforting requirement.
Clause 162, subclause 1(a) says the water services entities’ annual reports must include the remuneration received or payable to each of the chief executives and board members in that financial year.
Good. When these new public entities are established to run our storm, waste and drinking water services, they’ll be obliged to disclose what they’re paying their execs with, you know, ratepayers’ money.
You might think that the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) would absorb the spirit of this law and tell the public what it’s already paying the four establishment chief executives it hired earlier this year to launch the new water services entities (WSEs).
But it has better things to do as officials race headlong to a deadline of August 31, when the House rises for the election period, by which time the Government’s aim is that all of its water bills will have hurtled through Parliament and be snugly bedding in. Read more >
It is impossible to look on the sorry state of insolvent Ruapehu Alpine Lifts – its assets on the block for a dollar or two, its future entirely in the hands of the Crown – and not hear the echoes of Shane Jones and Jacinda Ardern’s big-talking 2018 promises of help for the regions: to unlock economic growth, for jobs, and high-value tourism, all to be enabled through their bold new multi-billion-dollar Provincial Growth Fund.
For Ruapehu Alpine Lifts (RAL), the fund’s touted beneficence has proved to be a poisoned chalice. Five years after taking its first concessionary $10 million loan from the fund, and three years after taking its second ($5m), the little not-for-profit ski lift operator – the main purpose of which is to provide for amateur alpine sport on the slopes of Mt Ruapehu – is essentially kaput.
We know the Government’s efforts to keep RAL’s two ski hills operating (Tūroa and Whakapapa) have already cost taxpayers $28m in loans that are likely to be written off entirely. On top of that, Cabinet has approved a package of financial help for would-be purchasers of RAL’s assets that almost undoubtedly tops $100m. RAL is now operating under the authority of liquidator PwC.
A $100m cost to the Crown is conservative. It includes nullifying RAL’s liabilities to the Department of Conservation for returning its ski fields, which are on National Park land, to a natural state in the event of closure; the purchasing company or companies would have no responsibility to “make good” what is already on the mountain (this liability has an estimated cost of $50m to $100m). Read more >
The Chateau Tongariro is a famous building in a country too new to enduring architecture, and too geologically hostile, to have more than a handful of such places. Some say it is a national treasure and the jewel in the crown of the Tongariro National Park which must be kept and restored. Neo-Georgian, a Category 1 historic place, spectacular in its mountain and parkland setting, steadfast beneath the volcanic cones.
But the cost of keeping the Chateau, though still cloudy, may well top $100 million. It could be much more, and it is likely to be borne by taxpayers.
The building is very seriously seismically unsound. There is additional disrepair which appears to be significant. Renovation is overdue. Furthermore, a lump sum payment is owed to the Chateau’s previous leaseholders.
This latter cost is only hinted at in the Department of Conservation’s bland phrase: lease termination negotiations. These are ongoing.
The Chateau sits on Crown land, and on March 9, care and responsibility for its buildings reverted to the Department of Conservation (DoC) when Malaysia-based hotelier Kah NZ declined to renew the lease.
But there’s more to this picture. Read more >
Finance Minister Grant Robertson is on the hustings, defending, for the sake of his Government’s future, and indeed the history books, his spending record.
There’s little doubt that he brought the country with him in the early days of massive pandemic borrowing and spending. But histories seek turning points, and the last $5 billion with which Robertson topped up the fund for fighting Covid may be one.
First, Robertson’s view. All is chaos when we enter the story: in early 2022 he didn’t know what new Omicron-battling measures would cost and there was a credible risk that they would outstrip the $2b remaining in the Covid Response and Recovery Fund (CRRF). So he added $5b to this envelope of funding, supposed to indicate what the Government was comfortable spending to fight Covid-19 and all of it factored into the Treasury’s fiscal picture, including long-term debt.
The Finance Minister has told the Herald many times that the CRRF was for response and recovery. He says this always included immediate response measures, such as in the health system, and other programmes that supported businesses, households and the wider economy.
He doesn’t accept that the top-up was an undisciplined and cynical way of lifting Government spending on all and sundry. Neither does he accept that roughly half of this $5b (all of it debt) was almost immediately spent on non-Covid priorities.
There is, however, another version of these events; it spans exactly 69 days. Read more >
Kate MacNamara is a South Island-based journalist with a focus on policy, public spending and investigations. She spent a decade at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before moving to New Zealand. She joined the Herald in 2020.
The Public Purse is her fortnightly Herald column focused on the public sector and how taxpayer money is spent.
