He seems like a serious sort of man who takes his job seriously which is the kind of person I quite like.
So I have nothing against him, but he has to lose his job over the stuff ups this election.
There have been too many stuff ups:
The problem getting getting the Easy Vote cards out before the election.
The computers system crashed for a while on election day.
They lost an entire box of votes in the final count.
15 seats ended up having wrong final counts.
And finally, they thought it was a good idea to put a voting booth in a marae in Manurewa where the CEO of the marae was running for parliament and won the seat and is now an MP.
If you were generous, and most of us are, you could probably excuse a few counting errors and and a computer system crashing because mistakes happen.
But this many mistakes is too many, and there is no excuse for putting the voting booth in the marae.
Sure, Karl wasn't personally counting the votes and running the computer system so you might think it’s harsh for him to lose his job.
But here’s why he has to: standards, and Karl should be made an example of to the rest of the public service.
Because it is getting sloppy all over the place
Stats NZ stuffed up two censuses in a row, the Electoral Commission stuffed up the election, Adrian Orr stuffed up inflation, Pharmac's CEO got busted writing snarky emails about a journalist cum patient advocate, and today the NZQA stuffed up the NCEA level 1 English exam when the online system couldn't handle 20,000 students and slowed down so badly 10% of them couldn't do it online.
We have a right to expect our public servants to do their jobs to a certain standard and if they don’t there should be consequences.
If the incoming government wants to tidy up the public service and get them operating anywhere near the same standard as businesses up and down this country they have the perfect way to send a message.
Start by holding the boss of the Electoral Commission responsible for a job badly done.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.
1 comment:
It's hard to understand why we should appear to be so incompetent in our public service. Were we always, and just didn't notice? The elected 'governors' have been appalling, but this is hardly an excuse for the large number of the rest of us who work in the public service. I do agree that many of the stupidities have been as a result of the woke trying to do it the Maori way - hence the marae polling booth (Peeni Henare would be a real loss) but that can't explain it all.
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