On taking the fall for Anne Tolley

Anyone looking for a textbook case of the apparent politicisation of the public service need look no further than the case of former Northland kura principal Debroah Anne Mutu, who became a potential embarrassment for then-Education Minister Anne Tolley, six weeks out from the election.

The initial RNZ report had cited a claimed lack of quality controls in education appointments – as exemplified by an already suspended former kura principal in Northland being appointed to a specialist advisory job with the Ministry. In the House, Tolley came out with all guns blazing on October 6th and branded the original RNZ story as being “completely false” in that no person who fitted such a category was currently in an advisory position.

Right. It now transpires that the distinction was a largely semantic one. Mutu – though not named in the original story – had been suspended for a year, had then resigned and was then appointed to an advisory role. So, in fact, she didn’t fit the exact category as described on RNZ in that she wasn’t still under suspension when appointed.

However, there were ongoing disciplinary proceedings going on within the teaching profession. The main reason we now know this is because both Deborah Mutu and her husband John Mutu have since been struck of the teachers’ roll, over charges of serious misconduct – which included an inappropriate relationship between John Mutu and a 15 year old pupil, and poor performance by the kura headed by Mrs Mutu.

So, having first protected the Minister by advising that no-one in an advisory capacity fitted the precise description cited in the RNZ story, the Education Ministry is now taking the fall as well. It has conceded that its vetting procedures were not rigorous enough and claimed that it did not know the full extent of the allegations against Mrs Mutu, or that she was still facing disciplinary action when it employed her. In appointing her, the Ministry said it had merely followed the recommendation of the national kura organization – whose president at the time, incredibly enough, was John Mutu. In future, the Ministry swears it will try to do better in future, and will require candidates to make declarations about pending charges, or court hearings.

What we are being asked to swallow is that when the original RNZ story first surfaced, no-one in the Ministry thought… hang on a minute, that description fits Deborah Mutu almost to a T, and hmm, it looks as if we took her on board on the recommendation of a body headed by her husband over whose head something of a cloud is still looming. We are being asked to believe that the Ministry had no institutional memory of the Mutu case – of his inappropriate behaviour, and of her kura’s performance shortcomings – either when appointing her, or when, in effect, defending her this year. That would require a series of memory lapses too sweeping to be even faintly credible.

It is far more likely that the Ministry – and the Minister – knew they’d been caught out, yet tried to concoct a plausibly deniable defence strategy. One that attacked the semantics of the RNZ story rather than address its substance. Ultimately a loophole was found that would allow the entire story to be rubbished and with luck (and the usual short attention span of the media news cycle) buried for good. It is only because of subsequent action by the teachers’ professional organization that this apparent collusion has been exposed to further examination.

Unfortunately, nothing useful will result. The Ministry has now taken the fall for their former Minister. It promises to do better. Well… until next time, and the next Ministry gets caught out. Anyone who has any experience with Official Information Act requests will recognise the process involved here. The system is adept at parsing OIA requests to find loose wording and/or loopholes that will allow information to be denied, especially if it might have a potentially embarrassing outcome for the Minister. Anecdotally, I have been told about staff who are prized precisely for their talent in finding creative and ingenious ways, within the law, to frustrate OIA requests and withhold the information being sought.

In the Mutu case, Tolley owes RNZ an apology, as well as needing to make a formal apology to the House. Reportedly, pressure is building on her to do so, in Parliament.

Even if – as seems likely – Tolley tries to portray herself as the innocent victim of her Ministry, this isn’t credible. Even bad advice at the time would not subsequently absolve her of an obligation to step forward and offer a correction and apology as soon as the full details emerged. Instead, Tolley is being dragged kicking and screaming towards that course of action. And this is the person who has just been appointed as Minister of Police. How can the public – or Prime Minister John Key – have any confidence in Tolley, in that role?

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On the guy who REALLY is running North Korea

Years ago and while still a cub reporter, I had to accompany Muhammad Ali, Bundini Brown and rest of the Ali retinue on a week long tour of speaking engagements and exhibition fights in New Zealand. It was only on the last day of the tour that I finally figured out that Ali was not the kingpin of this troupe, and that the road manager (a guy called Harold Smith) was actually the boss of the entire operation. Smith had hired Muhammad Ali (and not the other way around) as a franchise operation for the duration of the trip, to pull in the punters. The evidence had been there, all along. It just took a mindset change to see things in the right light.

That same arrangement came to mind yesterday, while watching the news about the death of Kim Jong-Il in North Korea. Read the rest of this entry »

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On Cunliffe’s likely role, and France as the next Eurozone crisis country

Later this afternoon, we’ll find out just how the new Labour leader David Shearer has managed the difficult task of rewarding his faction while bringing some of his opponents back into the tent. Since David Parker is almost certain to get the new shadow Finance portfolio opposite Finance Minister Bill English, Shearer’s immediate task is how to include defeated leadership contender David Cunliffe, and to mollify him for the added humiliation of losing his shadow Finance role.

Just guessing… but one solution would be to pit Cunliffe against Steven Joyce in a shadow Commerce/Economic Development role. Clearly, Cunliffe’s talents cannot be wasted entirely. Nor can he be given a reason to sit out the next term brooding in his tent like Achilles, until such time (post-Shearer) as the caucus comes around to apologise.

Using Cunliffe to mark Joyce would also be a highly ironic outcome, given that Joyce is the 800 pound gorilla on National’s front bench. So the reward for Cunliffe will be to do most of the heavy lifting for his caucus opponents during the next term, while Parker gets the far easier job of marking Bill English. I’m guessing that this will be how Shearer will use Cunliffe – I have no inside knowledge – but it would be a gesture of caucus unity that might appeal to Cunliffe’s vanity. They don’t want me, but they need me etc etc…

Meanwhile the Cunliffe foot soldiers most likely to feel the lash from being on the losing team will be Charles Chauvel and Lianne Dalziel. Incredibly, Chauvel has reportedly got offside with some Wellington-based Labour MPs by his consistent support for Cunliffe, despite the (irrelevant) fact that a few troops close to Grant Robertson and Annette King were deployed to help his battle against Peter Dunne in Ohariu. Such are the irrational resentments of Labour’s internal clan politics.

Need it be pointed out that if talent is meant to be the guiding principle, that Chauvel – now likely to be demoted – is patently more talented than Nanaia Mahuta, who is bound to be promoted because, because… she supported Cunliffe, but can’t be punished because Labour needs to maintain its momentum within Maoridom. Sigh.
And now, France. Hate to sound apocalyptic but… “Le ciel nous tombe sur la tête!” In the next few days, the expected credit downgrade of France by the Standard and Poors credit rating agency has the potential to spoil everyone’s Christmas.

The least of these worries is that the S&P credit downgrade will reportedly cost French taxpayers an extra $4 billion a year over the next ten years. Tough on them, given that – as the French have been trying to argue – Britain’s debt position is even worse, so why isn’t S&P coming down harder on the Brits? Good question. That aside, this likely credit downgrade will erode France’s ability to contribute significantly to the save-the-euro plan recently thrashed out in Brussels, thereby making that rescue plan look even less credible than before.

That’s important because… only by having Germany and France pumping in truckloads of dollars to the European Financial Stability Facility does the Brussels plan have any chance of saving Greece, Portugal etc etc from default and eventual departure from the euro – which in turn, would result in the disintegration of the entire European Union project.

Hitherto, budget balancing measures have been the focus of the Eurozone response. Yet budget balancing measures alone were never going to be enough, as former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the American journalist Charlie Rose a couple of weeks ago. Policies to promote economic growth, Brown stressed, were also essential:

Europe has three problems, really, and none of them have been properly addressed. One is obviously the fiscal problem itself, the second is a banking problem, and the third is a growth and competitiveness problem. And unless you deal with each of these and deal with them as a group, you’re not going to get the recovery that’s necessary. Low growth will cause deficits to continue to be high.

[Rose] : So which problem should be the top priority?

You’ve got to deal with the three problems together. You need to have measures for growth that allow you to continue to reduce your deficits. One of the problems we face is that, with tough austerity in Greece and Spain and Portugal, growth is not recovering. Therefore, revenues become difficult to collect. We failed to understand that there’s a financial sector problem that’s got to be dealt with, and there’s a competitiveness problem. What should happen now is, first of all, the [European Financial Stability Facility] has got to be strengthened. You’ve got to send a message to the markets that Europe has come together to sort out this problem, and it’s going to create a firewall that is strong enough. You’ve then got to have a longer-term plan for reforming the euro.

Are you talking about the inflexibility of the euro?

[The U.S.] can print dollars, but you’ve also got wage flexibility that is greater than Europe’s. You’ve got greater interstate mobility. People are prepared to travel and migrate within America. And you’ve got a central budget of 25 percent of your GDP. So you’ve got a budget that can actually intervene when you’ve got problems in some of the poorer states and some of the most difficult areas. Europe’s budget is only 1 percent of GDP. And we have got far bigger differences between the states in Europe than you have in the U.S., where perhaps the gap between the poorer states and the richer states is about 1.5 to 1. In Europe, it could be as much as 4, 5, 6 to 1.

Depressed, yet? Obviously… the Eurozone has far deeper problems than the cartoon depictions of thrifty Germans and wasteful, indolent Greeks and Italians who need a taste of the fiscal lash to get their houses in order. That was never the main problem.

In good times, the weaker Eurozone members were captive markets for the Germans – who had wanted them within the euro all along, lest they become low wage/lowcost industrial competitors for Germany, if kept outside it. (The likes of George Friedman in Stratfor have also cited Germany’s geographical advantage over southern Eurozone nations, by dint of Germany’s proximity to river-borne trade routes.)

So, just as the Eurozone recessionary problems weren’t grounded in bad behaviour by the lazy, wasteful Greece and Italy, they can’t be solved by simply tightening the spending screws on those countries. If only because, during a recession, policies to tighten the screws are likely to choke off the revenues that make repayment even remotely feasible, while wiping out those diligent members of the middle class in countries such as Greece, who had been dutifully paying their taxes all along.

Policies to promote growth, in the midst of a recession? That need should be ringing a bell in New Zealand as well – where to date, the Key government has been behaving as if the only job that government needs do is to balance the budget, ASAP.

Balancing the budget is relatively easy, if you’re not on the receiving end of the pain. Policies to promote growth – which are necessary to create a sufficient number of well paying jobs to meet the real and aspirational goals of the middle class – is the far harder part of the economic development equation. That’s why the contest between Joyce and Cunliffe over the policy options to promote economic growth will be the real battleground of this second term.

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On Peter Dunne’s casting vote on asset sales

As the late Roger Kerr pointed out in 2005, Peter Dunne went into the election that year advocating the 40% selldown of the government’s stake in most SOEs. So Dunne can hardly be accused of not being a consistent advocate of the partial privatisation model – he could more accurately claim that it was his idea in the first place.

Thus, the Greens are on very shaky ground in saying that Dunne doesn’t have a mandate to support the 49% selldown this year. In the end, that would turn on whether you regard Dunne’s stated opposition this year to the privatisation of water (which most people would see as opposition to the privatising of domestic water supplies) as also entailing an opposition to privatising the water used by hydro dams to generate electricity.

This year, Dunne’s strategy on assets sales was to present himself as the bulwark against the kind of total privatisation model we saw in the 1980s – which wasn’t being advocated by anyone but the Act loonies – and by contrast, to present his tacit support for the 49% selldown as (somehow) being a moderate alternative.

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On the Labour leadership change

So it is to be David Shearer as leader, and Grant Robertson as deputy. With David Cunliffe, there were always two concerns. One, whether the wider public would warm to Cunliffe’s combatively intellectual style, and secondly whether his caucus would support him loyally in the battle against the Key government. With David Shearer, the concern is whether he can carry the fight in Parliament and beyond, with sufficient confidence and authority.

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On the coalition agreements

Now that the three deals done to maintain the National-led coalition are all on the table, its pretty clear how shabby these arrangements really are. United Future for instance has won the promise to “investigate free annual health checks for over 65s when fiscal circumstances allow” – which probably means that any current 65 year olds will be lucky to live to see the benefits of that pledge to “investigate” the idea, whenever “fiscal circumstances” finally make it affordable. Not exactly trumping the Gold Card.

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On Peter Jackson and the West Memphis Three

At first glance, the news earlier this week that Peter Jackson has just completed a documentary on the West Memphis Three case might seem somewhat odd. After all, the three Paradise Lost documentaries made by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky on the WM3 case have already been one of the most exhaustive and successful pieces of advocacy journalism in the history of cinema.

Moreover, the third Paradise Lost doco was released only a few months ago at the Toronto Film Festival and – now equipped with an added coda about the release from jail of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jesse Miskelley – the doco is being shown in Europe, and elsewhere.

However, Jackson is right. The need remains to push on and maintain the pressure for a complete pardon. In order to get out of jail – and when we’re saying jail we’re talking in Echols’ case about being locked away on dearth row amid sensory and social deprivation in one of America’s hideous Supermax prisons – the trio had to take a so-called ‘Alford plea’.

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On income inequality

The OECD report this week that has found New Zealand to have one of the fastest growing income gaps in the entire OECD will come as no surprise.

Since the 1980s, successive governments have been complicit in a wealth transfer of massive proportions, as tax revenues collected by increasingly regressive means (eg the flattening of the income tax scales, the imposition of highly regressive consumption taxes) have been wasted in tax cuts that have disproportionately favoured the wealthy, while a major form of wealth accumulation (via capital gains) has been barely touched at all.

It is not exactly rocket science that when you do such things, you will get a society of unequal opportunity and wasted potential, marked by the usual array of criminal behaviours and poor health outcomes that follow in the wake of systematic income inequality. Such problems are particularly rife in the United States, where Treasury and the Act Party continue to draw their inspiration.

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On charter schools

Since its inception. Act has been the party of American Crackpot Theories, so we should probably be thankful that the coalition agreement between Act Party leader John Banks and the Key government didn’t include a constitutional right to bear arms.

However, the trial of charter schools that is being proposed (within some of the poorer communities in New Zealand) is yet another piece of US right wing extremism. And yes, you have a right to be surprised, given that charter schools weren’t mentioned at all during the election campaign.

Well, they’re on the agenda now – and not because they will be more efficient, or will produce better educational outcomes (neither claim is supported by the research) but because Act has an ideological distaste for the state provision of education, and almost everything else.

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On the Labour Party leadership race

Newness is in the air, in every sight and every sound. Both candidates seeking to become Labour’s next leader have been citing the need for change, and claiming they’re the right broom for the job – whether it require a change of direction, a revamp of the Labour Brand, the learning of lessons from the election defeat… whatever. Meanwhile, the pundits have been offering their five cents on the substance of the change required.

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