Posts by andrew llewellyn
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Dealing with the local DHB (or whatever the hell they were called in the mid-ish 90's) during my brief and inglorious career as a provincial hack,
If you mean Dept Building & Housing - it was probably the Ministry of Housing in those days.
If you mean HNZC in those days, well that was before my time :) But it reminds me that in my early days, to get a feel for what these questions meant & how they should be answered... I trawled back through years of PQs. There was one particular National Minister of Housing, under whose governance, if the answers to PQs weren't from a complete incompetent (to be diplomatic), must have been deliberately misleading.
the very paragon of animals
I'm sure too - but the powers that were were far more interested in keeping off the front page of newspapers by being honest, than they were in hiding anything.
-
Excepting, presumably, Fonterra, Telecom, Aventis, ANZ, Solar Turbines, Tertra Pak and Toyota, who all choose the same five-star luxury lodge in Taupo as the "APN team" does.
I nearly bit at this one too. As someone who now works in the Corporate Learning industry & who sees what a lot of corporates do (until we advise them otherwise with any luck)... I was wondering which specific corporates ever got bored with them?
-
when i was at IRD we had two dockets for drinks at the christmas party. total cost? $8.
To save the dept money when at dinner after some "Future Leaders" workshop (the luxurious Overses Terminal), our group of 6 or so deputised me to go to New World & get wine (as per instructions issued as part of some sort of exercise). Long story short, that attempt at frugality certainly did save the taxpayer, due to the machanics of the rules, I wore the lot. A "very sorry" from the GM who refused to sign it off. Who demanded we attend the damned thing anyway.
-
Your questions - wanting a breakdown of waiting lists - might well ave been answered there were 10 families on the waiting list ... when there were also 10 on the B waiting list and a further 10 on the C.
We'd report that as a matter of course each month anyway - on the website, to the board & the ministers office, the media...
One spreadsheet, NHU down one axis, A,B,C & D across the other, national totals at the bottom.
When I was getting 45 a month, that was from a "good MP". Their predecessor was sending hundreds & hundreds for the same info (and getting 45 answers from us).
-
Actually, it reminds me of a Gartner Group review that criticised HNZC for operational costs out of kilter with comparative organisations in New Zealand (no-one could name any organisations comparastive to HNZC though).
There were 6 highly paid analyst programmers in my team alone pretty much answering PQs & OIA, and building systems to make it easier to answer those questions (and Board reports). Goodness knows how many communications people dealing with the rest.
How many private companies have to wear that sort of cost? (Dunno, maybe there are some, and HNZC definitely should be reporting this stuff - the criticism on those grounds rankled with me though.)
-
No-one should have to apologise for the costs of holding government to account.
In theory I'd agree, in practice though, and while the majority of MPs (or their staff most likely) are not like this, there are some who ask questions, and ask in such a manner as to create unreasonable amounts of work for the government agencies in answering them.
Sometimes I'd be conviced there was intent to divert us from actual work to answering ridiculous questions for no discernable reason, so that our lack of achievement could be questioned in Parliamant at a later date.
To summarise - I wouldn't mind if time & money wasters were held to account, they cost me & my team a lot of time & the taxpayer quite some money.
-
And I don't know about you, but I'd quite like some 'wag' to do some digging and name and shame government departments, and Ministers, who would be doing us all a favour if they just complied with the Official Information Act and it's "principle of availability."
Well during my tenure HNZC were lauded for their transparency, speed & enthusiasm for answering all the PQs & OIAs they could.
</halo>
-
HNZC helped answer 577 Parliamentary questions, many of which will have been exquisitely political in nature
Is that all? When I was their Information Manager, I'd see 45 PQs cross my desk each month - those were requests for operational stats - waiting lists, vacancy rates et al. Then there were the questions on policy which I usually had no imput into, I'd heva thought they got asked thousands each year.
National - a variety of shadow spokesmen (and Muriel Newman - although hers often weren't answered because they were unanswerable gibberish) would also ask numerous questions which could be asked in one, eg:
1. How many people in the Grey Lynn Neighbourhood unit were on the waitng list at 31 Dec 2001
2. How many people in the Grey Lynn NHU were on the B waiting list
3. Grrey Lynn C waiting List'
4. Grey Lynn D waiting List
5. How many people in the Otahuhu NHU were on the A waiting list...etc etc (42 NHUs).
We'd answer 168 questions with one spreadsheet.
Which is why I think that assessing MPs performances on the number of PQs they ask to be laughable.
-
Teleconferencing definitely has its uses
Housing NZ do a lot of video conferencing, their 3 National Offices are (were 3 years ago anyway) set up for it & it gets used routinely & widely.
HNZC are by no means a profligate organisation - there's very little racking up of entertainment on corporate credit cards. Very little entertainment in fact.
I do uncharitably wonder where the income that pays for Dot's income related rent comes from - are the government payuing her rent for the last 8 years & next 7 years anyway?
-
Do you not have a lime green bio hazard suit yet? They're all the rage in Kelburn. Morte so than hoodies.