Wintec — If you pay millions you get monkeys

The Monday before last was an important deadline and I’m afraid to say that I missed it. Applications closed for the position of chief executive of Wintec, the Hamilton based tertiary institute. It’s a pity really as if anything I am over qualified for the job and am in need of a long holiday.

Wintec spent $75,000 on the appointment process alone. I would have settled for that kind of money. Frankly, I would do the job for a third of it. We could have cut out the middle man, Auckland based recruitment agency, Generator Talent Group.

They sound like an old Datsuns song to me. Still, it cannot be easy replacing someone with the skill set of incumbent Mark Flowers, a gentleman who has elected to see out the last few months of his tenure at home, safely tucked up in bed.

I suppose these things assume a momentum of their own. It does seem rather a pity to go through with the farce of appointing another obscenely salaried incompetent at the very time when the government has signalled its intention to consolidate all of the country’s 16 polytechnics into a single entity.

What will happen to the new appointee when this plan is implemented or ‘‘rolled out’’ or whatever the current buzz word is?

Will he or she continue to draw their modest stipend of between $420,000 and $429,000 a year? I suspect so.

They’ll be an ironclad contract and guarantees of six figure golden handshakes.

It’s probable that the appointee will aspire still higher and apply for the job of chief executive of the new uber polytechnic.

What’s 16 times $420,000? $6.72 million?

Now we are talking. That’s real money.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The task at hand, finding a new Mark Flowers, is a daunting one, even if you breathe rarefied Auckland air.

Folk with an aversion to answering simple, direct questions, those with the gall not only to travel to Hong Kong, China, the Middle East and Spain on the public coin but a propensity to spend taxpayer money in the wee hours, signing off on bills written in a foreign language, well, they do not just grow on trees.

That kind of entitlement isn’t simply taught.

A natural inclination toward the profligate – state funded largesse, if you will – is perhaps innately born but I suspect it takes years on big money to find fullest expression.

Nothing exceeds quite like excess: pay a man more than anyone is worth and it’s a sure thing he’ll want more. Mr Flowers is a special case but he’s not a unique one. In the last couple of years it’s been Hamilton’s good fortune to enjoy two such high profile clowns.

As luck would have it, an Audit New Zealand report into the mysteries of Wintec spending on Flowers’ watch coincides with fresh information about the activities of former Waikato DHB boss Nigel Murray.

Details about much of what Flowers got up to are vague, allowing Wintec council chairman Barry Harris to explain it away as ‘‘looseness of process’’ rather than ‘‘wrongdoing’’ but Murray’s excessive spending on relocation costs, trips to Las Vegas and Canada, involving a car rented for two months at a stretch, flights booked for two women who were not his wife and bills incurred at two separate locations at the same time, are transparently suspect.

If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, or so the old saying would have us believe.

I would suggest that the Mark Flowers and Nigel Murray examples manifestly demonstrate the opposite.

Whether it be out and out corruption or merely looseness when it comes to reconciling the expense account, folk who are paid more than ten times the average wage will inevitably lose touch with the simple fiscal realities that govern the majority of us.

They will have absolutely no idea about lives lived on the minimum wage or less.

How could a Wintec chief executive on $429,000 a year possibly have insight into the challenges faced by a working class student attending his institution?

How could a DHB executive on $539, 391 a year understand the harsh truths of fighting cancer on next to no financial reserves?

The woes of Wintec more than justify Labour’s proposed restructure of polytechnics.

It’s a pity a party of the nominal left shows less appetite for facing the systemic inequalities of wider society.

Paying the chief executive of the new organisation less than half a million dollars would be a step in the right direction.