John McLean: Dame Patsy, forever on commission

Reddy, Set, Go. Please, please...just GO

In May 2024, Dame Patricia Lee Reddy turned 70 years of age. That’s the biblical threescore years and ten. Psalm 90/10 in the King James Version of the Bible goes like this:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away

What Psalm 90/10 is basically saying is that 70 years is a decent duration of human life and living to 80 years involves burgeoning difficulty and pain…and you’ll be dead soon enough anyway.

While we naturally don’t wish death upon Patsy Reddy, I do wish that – figuratively speaking - she’d be “soon cut off” and just “fly away”. Unfortunately, the Unpalatable Vegan Patsy is not about to be consumed or binned any time soon.

The Grand Dame has just been appointed to replace Rod Carr as chair of New Zealand’s Climate Change Commission. Reddy’s term as Climate Change Commission Chair will begin in February 2025, the exact same time as her tenure as Chair of New Zealand Rugby will end. Patsy will shift seamlessly from one chair she’s been unqualified to occupy, to another chair she’s equally unqualified to occupy. How long she’ll remain Climate Change Commissioner has not been announced.

As with Carr, Patsy will be paid hundreds of thousands of our dollars for doing whatever Climate Change Commissioners are supposed to do. Reddy loves the Reddies.

The Dame’s trail of destruction

At first blush, Reddy’s track record is impressive, but doesn’t bear the mildest of scrutiny. Starting out as a private practice lawyer, she moved to Brierley Investments in 1987. Sir Paul Collins had moved to Brierleys as its chief executive in 1985. By the time Patsy and Paul left Brierleys in 1998 they had, through a series of catastrophic commercial ventures, reduced the once proud corporate raider to rubble. Despite his ruinous reign, Collins shamelessly managed to extract a $5.4 million payout on departure.

But the indefatigable duo were not done after Brierleys. In 2000 they founded investment firm Active Equities, along with fellow Brierleys saboteur Bruce Hancox. Active Equities duly failed but by that stage Patsy was picking up directorships like a hyperactive kid at a lolly scramble, including of gambling company SKYCITY and price gouging national carrier Air New Zealand. Naturally, she was an early passenger on the Treaty of Waitangi Settlements Gravy Train.

In 2009, Patsy co-founded the oxymoronic “Global Women New Zealand”.

Dead eyed former Prime Minister John Key appointed Feisty Patsy as New Zealand’s Governor-General in 2016, a position she held until 2021. But with the role of Governor-General being largely a ceremonial sinecure, Reddy can’t be held responsible for the Labour Government’s parlous economic mismanagement from 2020 to 2023.

Patsy kills New Zealand’s national sport

Dame Patsy does, however, bear significant personal responsibility for the terrible financial sinkhole into which New Zealand Rugby has toppled. With absolutely no Rugby Union pedigree or credentials, Patsy brought her toxic mix of financial incompetence and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) zealotry to New Zealand Rugby when she joined its Board in April 2022, becoming the Board Chair in December 2022.

The pervasive DEI dottiness that the Dame brought to NZR included compulsory female and Māori domination of the NZR Board. Bizarrely - but consistent with her Woke cultural elitism – she tried to ban New Zealand Provincial Union representatives from the NZR Board.

With typical petulance, egotism and untrustworthiness, Reddy announced she’d quit if the didn’t get her own way on her Provincial Union representation ban and, when she didn’t…didn’t quit. With “Progressive” word salad verbiage, Reddy talked patronizingly of the “lived experience of the provincial unions”.

Financial ruin looms for the New Zealand Rugby. Principal sponsors Ford & Steinlager have abandoned the sinking ship.

Never in the history of New Zealand professional sport administration has the expression “Go Woke, Go Broke” been so apposite. It’s no exaggeration to say that Reddy and imbecilic NZR CEO Mark Robinson have teamed up to wreck New Zealand’s national game. Bravo.

What’s to make of Reddy’s latest lark?

What can we therefore take from Reddy’s appointment as Climate Change Commissioner?

First, the insular swamp that is New Zealand’s senior public service shows no sign of draining. As with new Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche, and ex-Police Minister and now Social Investment Agency CEO Andrew Coster, Reddy is a darling of both the Labour and National political parties. The impregnable Fortress Club endures. It’s Whac-A-Mole. They just keep popping up.

Furthermore, National’s appointment of Reddy as CC Commissioner and the latest Half-Year Economic & Fiscal Update (HYEFU) is yet more damning evidence that National is essentially indistinguishable from Labour, fiscally and otherwise. It’s simply business as usual for the managerial and political classes, with only the ACT and NZ First Parties offering any hope of the sort of robust, constructive change that New Zealand now so desperately needs.

The CC Commission has 75 full time employees. What this horde pretends to do all day is anybody’s guess. All we know for sure is that nothing the CC Commission does will change Earth’s climate one iota and, according to the Commission’s latest annual report (for the year ended 30 June 2024), the Commission currently costs New Zealand taxpayers about $20 million every year, and it’s growing.

According to the CC Commission’s legislation, the main ways of tackling climate change are to be discovered in the Treaty of Waitangi, as interpreted by people with Māori ancestry or cultural affiliation. Just a few Tasty Treaty Woo Woos to be found in New Zealand’s Climate Change Response Act:

In order to recognise and respect the Crown’s responsibility to give effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi:

• particular attention is required to seeking nominations from iwi and Māori representative organisations

• the Minister must, before recommending the appointment of a member to the Commission, have regard to the need for the Commission to have members who have technical and professional skills, experience, and expertise, and innovative approaches, relevant to the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi)

• the Minister must include in an emissions reduction plan a strategy to recognise and mitigate the impacts on iwi and Māori of reducing emissions and must ensure that iwi and Māori have been adequately consulted on the plan

• the Minister must, in preparing a plan, take into account the economic, social, health, environmental, ecological, and cultural effects of climate change on iwi and Māori

• before recommending the making of secondary legislation…the Minister must consult, or be satisfied that the chief executive has consulted, representatives of iwi and Māori that appear to the Minister or chief executive likely to have an interest in the secondary legislation

Before nominating a person for appointment, the nominating committee must…consult…iwi and Māori representative organisations.

Before recommending the appointment of a member of the Commission, the Minister must have regard to the need for the Commission to have members who, collectively, have…technical and professional skills, experience, and expertise in, and an understanding of innovative approaches relevant to…the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) and te ao Māori (the Māori world), including tikanga Māori (Māori custom and protocol), te reo Māori (the Māori language), mātauranga Māori (traditional Māori knowledge), and Māori economic activity.

Here's outgoing’s CC Commissioner’s departing statement, straight from the Commission’s latest annual report. God help us. How many Aotearoans can actually read and make sense of this pervasive genre of guff?

Click to view

If New Zealand is going to haul itself out of the financial sh*t into which it has plopped, it’ll have to take a chainsaw to the bloated public service, starting with the likes of the Climate Change Commission, and wean itself off the likes of Dame Patsy Reddy.

New Zealand desperately needs its own version of Argentinian President Javier Milei. Milei has chain sawed half of Argentina’s Government ministries. In doing so, he has courageously ended his beloved country’s 50 years of economic mismanagement. New Zealand sorely needs a leader with the same courage, vision and tenacity. And it aint Christopher “Kamala” L, or Chris “Chippy” H.

John McLean is a citizen typist and enthusiastic amateur who blogs at John's Substack where this article was sourced.