They deliberately misled MPs. That's what the committee found.
Just think about that – it wasn't an accident. This isn't a maybe they did/maybe they didn't scenario.
They deliberately misled them.
The punishment is... there is no punishment. Unless you believe the committee saying what it did is punishment enough, which, as it turns out, is exactly how it unfolds.
This is unique to the public service. You fail at the job, you fail to be independent, and you fail to be honest, but short of being outed as such, that’s where it stays.
Nowhere else in the New Zealand workforce can that happen the way it has.
Smallish side note, which also gives insight into the public service; they claim they didn’t want to say anything about the IT project being dead because they were negotiating a commercial exit with various other players in the project.
They could have, but didn’t realise, talked to MPs in private to inform them of this critical piece of information.
These people were at the top of the public service tree and yet didn’t realise how the system works.
You see it, ironically, in the Parliament all the time with MPs. They don’t know how Parliament works and they don’t understand rules and standing orders. It reminds you of just how many people go to work in this country and aren't really interested in being that good.
The public service has had a rough time of it. The claim is they are not fans of the Government and events like this merely show the suspicion is well-founded.
It's an odd and worrying mix between Machiavellian behaviour, arrogance that they think they know best, and sheer dishonesty.
There's no good way at looking at how this played out.
And yet this is unique to the public service. The service we all pay for and the service I'm sure any number of unions would defend on an almighty ideological hill. You can do what McDonald and Blakeley did and still get to turn up the next day.
It's inexplicably absurd.
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.
They deliberately misled them.
The punishment is... there is no punishment. Unless you believe the committee saying what it did is punishment enough, which, as it turns out, is exactly how it unfolds.
This is unique to the public service. You fail at the job, you fail to be independent, and you fail to be honest, but short of being outed as such, that’s where it stays.
Nowhere else in the New Zealand workforce can that happen the way it has.
Smallish side note, which also gives insight into the public service; they claim they didn’t want to say anything about the IT project being dead because they were negotiating a commercial exit with various other players in the project.
They could have, but didn’t realise, talked to MPs in private to inform them of this critical piece of information.
These people were at the top of the public service tree and yet didn’t realise how the system works.
You see it, ironically, in the Parliament all the time with MPs. They don’t know how Parliament works and they don’t understand rules and standing orders. It reminds you of just how many people go to work in this country and aren't really interested in being that good.
The public service has had a rough time of it. The claim is they are not fans of the Government and events like this merely show the suspicion is well-founded.
It's an odd and worrying mix between Machiavellian behaviour, arrogance that they think they know best, and sheer dishonesty.
There's no good way at looking at how this played out.
And yet this is unique to the public service. The service we all pay for and the service I'm sure any number of unions would defend on an almighty ideological hill. You can do what McDonald and Blakeley did and still get to turn up the next day.
It's inexplicably absurd.
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.
4 comments:
Mike.
I am well-known for my commentary on the public service, especially on the dreadful bullying that has been going on there for more than twenty years. Along with the bullying, we have seen the emergence of underqualified and relatively inexperienced people into management and then to the executive teams.
I saw the bullying going on around me when I worked in the public sector and it was then, and continues to be, a national disgrace. People only two or three years out of university, often holding irrelevant and modest qualifications and having no particular achievement, coming in off the street (onto very high salaries) to manage teams of experienced experts and then abusing those experts out of employment. Some of the worst managers held no qualifications at all. Why were such people managing experts?
Physical intimidation, framing of disliked staff in order to make them look incompetent, deliberately inserting errors into reports written by disliked staff, plagiarism, deliberate isolation of disliked staff – all of this and much more. Of course, further bullying from Human Resources. I saw the lot! And I have seen first-hand the very damaging effects on people who have been treated like this and have lost their careers.
Quite apart from a very clear deficit in political neutrality, we see little or no accountability. Not only a considerable degree of bloat, but we have also witnessed a serious decline in average capability. My own discussions with former employers who have continued bullying for many years, have revealed a complete lack of contrition and a total absence of accountability. Public service Human Resources is another very serious problem. And we see that the highly-remunerated managers and executives retain their public-funded salaries and continue their bad behaviour until retirement – after damaging dozens of others.
Perhaps exposure of negative behaviours at organizations such as New Zealand’s financial conduct regulator will create the necessary precedent, but here we see only the tip of a very large iceberg. Education is particularly bad.
I know that what I say about our public service makes me unpopular in certain quarters. However, we must stand up for what we believe in and those people bullied out of employment need to be recognised and supported. The present situation is not acceptable to the taxpayers of New Zealand and the time for change is long overdue.
This has been going on for decades... and decades. And basically they are a branch of the Labour party.... a law unto themselves. Anyone showing them up ..... isolation, disposal... Reckon the Executive service needs to be cleared each time a new party is in governance.
I really do not care whether someone in the public service bureaucracy has had their precious feelings hurt.
They systematically waste taxpayers hard earned money extorted by IRD legislation without a blink of responsibility through waste , neglect, karakias time off , sick time , without even paying a contribution to the cost of their employment - rent, electricity, rates, insurance .
The public service are generally educated derelicts or grifters and a drain on NZ.
What I'd like to know: in NZ, if someone goes on parental leave, which jobs get filled by temp workers? If not replaced with temporary hires, everybody else's workload goes up.
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