KEY POINTS:
When neither you nor your spouse is having an affair it is probably best that you do not write letters and make public statements denying any shagging is going on.
This is political common sense 101, yet former Health Minister Annette King has done exactly that in a
breathtaking act of stupidity, neatly adding the missing ingredient of sex to the scandal surrounding the Hawkes Bay District Health Board.
King, while Minister of Health, reportedly wrote a threatening letter to a board employee who had alerted King's husband Ray Lind, then chief operating officer of the board, to rumours that he was having an affair.
After the board was controversially sacked by new Health Minister David Cunliffe, King went public, alerting media to the sex rumours. Now, when confronted by reporters with questions about the letter, she accuses the media of being part of a "dirty tricks campaign" and refuses to confirm the letter exists, saying she cannot find it on the ministerial database, avoiding the question of whether she wrote it privately to the board employee.
Sacked board chairman Kevin Atkinson confirms he saw the letter.
It is just the latest weird instalment in the rolling maul that threatens to help derail Labour this election year.
To briefly recap the mess: then-Minister King insists on appointing businessman Peter Hausman to the elected board, despite the chairman warning her that Hausman will have conflicts of interest. Hausman quickly does have conflicts over a multi-million-dollar board contract he is bidding for. Tensions explode between the board and senior management at the DHB.
Lind is accused of pressuring a whistleblower who alerted the board to the conflicts. The whistleblower is restructured out of her job. Lind quits and goes to work for Hausman's company.
The fight spills into the public arena and eventually the new Minister of Health, Cunliffe, sacks the board. Cunliffe achieves the impossible, uniting the various warring local bodies in the Bay against him.
For eight months, a Department of Health review panel looks at conflicts of interest in the DHB. Curiously, the Government has chosen not to have the fiercely independent Auditor General do the report but uses the health department.
A leaked copy of the first draft of the report is injuncted by Hausman and the department. Accusations fly that the final version of the report has been watered down from the first, which contained more criticism of Hausman and less of the board.
The review panel finds a "culture of mistrust and dysfunction" in the board. While Hausman and others did have conflicts of interest, it blames the board for not having the proper procedures in place.
National promptly declares the report a "whitewash", David Cunliffe declares victory and the public is not much wiser.
The report is more interesting for what is not in it than what is. It doesn't cover whether King should have appointed Hausman; it doesn't comment on the fact that board staff gave Hausman tender documents ahead of rival bidders; it doesn't look at Lind's involvement with the whistleblower or Hausman's company.
Instead, it focuses on the fact the board did not give Hausman proper training in how to handle conflicts of interest and did not have sturdy practices in place to handle such matters.
This ignores that in April 2005, the board chairman warned the Health Department and Annette King that Hausman clearly had conflicts of interest and should not be appointed.
It ignores that on May 19, 2005 Hausman, in his own handwriting in an official disclosure form to the department, wrote: "For all matters where the potential for current or potential conflicts may arise I will need to declare such interests and abstain from participating where appropriate in relevant board decisions. In such matters [where] it is not obvious then such decisions would be placed in the hands of the board chairman."
This surely indicates he was fully aware of his responsibilities yet he didn't declare to the board his interest in a contract until February 21, 2006, after the whistleblower had piped up.
Perhaps most of all, the report failed to acknowledge that the DHB became a "culture of mistrust and dysfunctional" only after King appointed Hausman.
Meanwhile, Cunliffe continues to threaten the sacked board with further investigations of what it may have been up to, King burbles on about a dirty tricks campaign against her and the combined local bodies, and the sacked board prepares for legal action against the Government.
It is a mess that won't go away until there is a full, transparent, independent inquiry into what happened.