Why speaking up is right thing to do
Former health chair Rob Campbell is not going quietly, and thank goodness for that. Regardless of whether the Government was right to sack him for criticising National leader Christopher Luxon on cogovernance, Campbell’s unvarnished assessment of the parlous state of the public health system is something we’re not used to hearing from our public service bosses – frank, and brutally honest.
We all knew things were not well, of course; but it’s nice to hear someone confirm that from the inside and in such uncompromising terms.
To recap, Campbell is the high profile and highly successful company director who was wooed by the Government to chair its new public health agency, Te Whatu Ora. Presumably – and with good reason it seems – that was because he was seen as the right person to cut through the longstanding inertia and bloated bureaucracy of its predecessors.
But Campbell was sacked last week after heavily criticising National for its stance on cogovernance, of which he is strongly supportive in health.
He’s gone out with a bang, machine-gunning everyone over the sad state of affairs in health and the public service.
Supposedly he was sacked for breaching the rule of political neutrality – and it’s true that the public service is supposed to be politically impartial, the one constant in the delivery of services funded by the State, regardless of whichever direction the political winds may blow.
Mostly it is – but not necessarily to the betterment of the public service. You might think that a politically neutral public service, for instance, meant it would be led by fearless and principled mandarins willing to stand up to their political masters without fear or favour.
In practice, the system promotes those who won’t rock the boat; bosses who are adept at flexing their priorities and staff to the will of whichever political master is in charge.
That’s why chair appointments like Campbell are important, to challenge the status quo. But they’re also something of a grey area. Often they are a political appointment; lucrative chairmanships and directorships are seen as a reward for former MPs and party loyalists.
It would be naive to assume in those cases they don’t have political views.
There is more than an air of utu in Campbell’s take-down of politicians, bureaucrats and the health system since his sacking. The Government’s reasons for sacking him are for the most part purely self-serving; defending Campbell on the politically awkward issue of cogovernance would have burned up too much of the new prime minister’s political capital.
But Campbell has also been outspoken about the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on consultants in public health, of the hollowing out of the health bureaucracy by these same consultants in order to charge them back to the very same agencies they came from at a much higher rate, and of the urgency to divert further funding away from duplicated back office management and bureaucracy to the frontline.
Even Campbell’s defence of cogovernance was grounded in practicalities and the realities of a health system which has for decades let Ma¯ ori down on nearly every front, whether that’s the appalling gap in life expectancy with European New Zealanders, poorer health outcomes, poorer access to health services, or the myriad other reasons why the current system doesn’t work for them.
Campbell, in fact, was much better at articulating cogovernance than his former government masters.
That outspokenness, and his criticism of politicians of all stripes – not just National, he says he no longer trusts the Labour-led Government either – have all been offered up as reasons why the Government had no choice but to sack him.
But that assumes it’s wrong for the chair of such an important agency to challenge, or disagree, and to talk publicly about what usually stays well behind closed doors; in other words, it’s assumed that the Government should be able to trust that whoever they appoint to these positions will keep their mouth shut.
We’ve had decades of that and look where it’s got us.
Maybe it’s time for more Rob Campbells, not less.
He’s gone out with a bang, machinegunning everyone.