To be perfectly frank can curtail a career
Ministers taking the fall for cock-ups is a ‘quaint concept’.
WHEN THE Government set out its stall to downsize the country’s public services, it probably didn’t intend to do so by burning off two of the sector’s expensively hired chief executives from the United Kingdom – talents it evidently hoped would spearhead its ‘‘reforms’’ in respective branches of state.
The latest to go, amid tales of an acrimonious falling out with her minister, is Lesley Longstone, chief executive of the Ministry of Education. Longstone, with an estimated salary of about $500,000, resigned last week after just 13 months in the job, following a series of debacles and policy blunders in the education sector.
Given the radical brief she was evidently expected to implement – and Education Minister Hekia Parata’s facility for misplacing aides, advisers and functionaries – it was perhaps no surprise that something had to give. Or, more appositely, someone had to go.
Longstone follows Janet Grossman, head of Work and Income, who quit her role in June after less than a year in the job. It has been consistently stated she resigned for personal reasons to return to the UK, but one can’t help wonder whether the job turned out to be something other than the one for which she had been interviewed.
For around her appointment, Social Development Minister Paula Bennett and the Government established a high-powered Welfare Working Group – led by Paula Rebstock and drawn from the ranks of private sector ‘‘consultants’’ and other sympathetic notables. Its brief seemed to be to oversee policy development and quite possibly to assist in its implementation – which may have left Grossman wondering precisely what her role was.
One task she did find herself having to perform was disciplining Work and Income staff for accessing and using confidential client information, a chore no doubt made more delicate by the example the minister herself had previously set – in releasing private beneficiary information to the media to score political points.
In any case, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one chief executive in such circumstances might be seen to be unfortunate; to lose two looks like political mismanagement.
It raises the question again of the reluctance of ministers who cock up things up to do ‘‘the honourable thing’’ and take the fall themselves – an increasingly quaint concept, apparently. And, equally, leads to the supposition that life at the top of the public service these days is highly corrosive for anyone who might be inclined to frank discussions with their ministerial betters.
We will never know what impact or influence Grossman might have been able to have in the vexed realm of welfare. Certainly good minds and talents are needed to tackle intergenerational dependency and the complex web of associated economic, cultural and social factors.
One of those of course, is poverty, and as we head off to family gatherings, or private getaways to celebrate the festive season, spare a thought for the number of children in this country whose season will be anything but.
I went to a timely and topical Ray Henwood adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol the other night at Circa Theatre in Wellington. We tend to think ourselves so superior to the Victorians. In many respects we may be, but I wonder, attitudinally, just how far we have managed to move from Scrooge’s heartless prescription for the poor and the destitute: ‘‘Are there no prisons? . . . And the workhouses – are they Scan this logo to send an email for publication on our letters page. still in operation?’’
A couple of weeks ago, the Expert Advisory Group, set up by the Children’s Commissioner to provide pragmatic and realistic solutions to address both shortterm and long-term child poverty in this country, delivered its report.
It set out its stall by suggesting that as many as 270,000 children in New Zealand live in poverty. It delivered 78 recommendations, one or two of which had a cursory airing in public either to be dismissed as unworkable or deflected as already existing in some form.
I hope I’m proved wrong, but is this another report on the scandalous state of our children’s wellbeing that is simply going to be buried or put in the too-hard basket? For starters, it recommends a strategic approach to addressing child poverty which would include ‘‘the enactment of legislation requiring the measurement of child poverty, the setting of short-term and longterm poverty reduction targets, the establishment of various child poverty-related indicators, and the monitoring and regular reporting of results’’.
What price a public service chief executive sufficiently emboldened to take on a project such as this? And what better Christmas present for the country’s children.