The more I spend time looking at the CDHB figures, and talk to key people, the more I reckon we have witnessed a massive systemic failure by Government Departments. I have a natural unease about how Government Departments work anyway, but looking deeply into how decisions were made about CDHB, and the advice given to Ministers, makes me even more concerned.
It would appear that MOH and Treasury worked in tandem to take apart the CDHB executive who had refused to conform to their directives. Proving this will be difficult. Institutions will go to any length to cover their staff and prove that questions being asked are easily brushed aside. The massive victory yesterday of the Labour Government will make proving the injustice which has befallen the CDHB, has just been made more difficult.
I will now cover several matters which demonstrate how decisions are made by Central Government bureaucracies and how difficult it is to prove. I should say at the outset, I was a bureaucrat for many years. I was proud to be a public servant. Where bureaucracies have got to is not how they used to be run. They have become politicised. Many mention Helen Clark’s “no surprises” ruling for Departments which started what seems to prevail today. I’m not sure how we got there but things are bad right now. Here’s a few thoughts:
Article on how difficult it was to prove mistreatment of youth over decades and how this tie into CDHB:
This might seem a long shot, but, bear with me. In the article Aaron Smale describes the challenge of reporting on the Crown’s abuse of power and lack of transparency.
With this article I am not focusing on the issue he was investigating, bad and all as it is. I’m going to focus on the abuse of power and the lack of transparency by Government agencies.
The article started with these paragraphs:
Margaret Wilson, Attorney-General in the early 2000s, had been pressured by Crown Law officials to “shut it down.”
The “it” was the adolescent unit that ran at the Lake Alice psychiatric hospital in the 1970s. It was not the unit itself that needed to be shut down because it closed in 1977. It was the litigation the Crown was trying to head off that threatened to expose the government to serious legal and financial liability for not only Lake Alice but for the welfare homes that many thousands of children had been through.
A lot of the answers I received to questions in that first story simply raised more questions, none more so than why the Crown’s lawyers were so determined to shut down any investigation into what had happened at Lake Alice. Crown Law’s central reason for existing is to uphold the law and yet here they were trying to subvert it. It bothered me to the point that I started asking further questions, not getting any transparent or timely answers.
Crown’s lawyers were so determined to shut down any investigation into what had happened at Lake Alice. Crown Law’s central reason for existing is to uphold the law and yet here they were trying to subvert it.
So, the author started to use the OIA and immediately experienced massive blockage tactics by Government Departments.
Initially Crown Law said I couldn’t have the documents I was requesting because they were “legally privileged”. I took it to the Ombudsman, and Crown Law tried to argue that any document a lawyer had contributed to, or any meeting a lawyer had been involved in, meant it was legally privileged. This didn’t fly. I eventually got over 200 pages of documents, large chunks of which are quoted in my investigation, but I’ve no doubt there are thousands of others.
But the bit which really concerned me was the next paragraph:
Although the Ombudsman’s Office has been as helpful as it can, with limited resources and powers, the delays have been such that I thought it worth trying a different tack. In June of this year I emailed State Services Minister Chris Hipkins a long screed, cc’ing in the PM’s office. I sent this email to Hipkins because of his role as Minister for State Services and because this Government has said it has a commitment to greater transparency. I’ve yet to receive a reply from either Hipkins or the PM. I know they’ve had a global pandemic to deal with but I wasn’t asking about the price of milk. I was raising fundamental questions about government transparency and holding state institutions accountable. What I got in reply was silence.
The last paragraph really resounded with me as just this week I personally received this email from Hipkins’ office responding to a query I had submitted under the OIA:
Thank you for your request for official information.
This office has decided to extend the period of time available to respond to your request under section 15A of the Official Information Act 1982 (the Act) as further consultation is required.
You can now expect a response to your request on, or before, 5 November 2020.
You have the right, under section 28 of the Act, to ask the Ombudsman to review my decision to extend the time available to respond to your request.
Here’s what information I had asked for. In some cases, I had agreed to refine my questions at their request:
- “All correspondence between the Ministry of Health and the Minister of Health and all documents of advice, on the handling of the Canterbury District Health Board deficits. Refined to span the last 12 months.
- “All correspondence between the Ministry of Health and the Minister of Health and all documents of advice, on the handling of the Canterbury District Health Board deficits. Refined to span the last 12 months.
- “All correspondence between the Ministry of Health and the Minister of Health and all documents of advice, on the handling of the Canterbury District Health Board deficits. Refined to span the last 12 months.
- “All correspondence between the Ministry of Health and the Minister of Health and all documents of advice, on the handling of the Canterbury District Health Board deficits. Refined to span the last 12 months.
- “All correspondence between the Ministry of Health and the Minister of Health and all documents of advice, on the handling of the Canterbury District Health Board deficits. Refined to span the last 12 months.
- “All correspondence between the Ministry of Health and the Minister of Health and all documents of advice, on the handling of the Canterbury District Health Board deficits. Refined to span the last 12 months.
The article on abuse in state care has raised my concerns about cover-ups by the same Departments the author has experienced blocks over, and the same Minister. It fills me full of concern, but, makes me even more determined to prove the dishonesty this region has experienced by both Government Departments, and the National and Labour Parties in covering them up.
Here’s the article: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/abuse-in-state-care-taking-on-the-crown
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