Turner Judy: Urgent Debates — Hawke’s Bay District Health Board—Appointment of Commissioner 
Turner Judy: Urgent Debates — Hawke’s Bay District Health Board—Appointment of Commissioner 
[Volume:645;Page:14544] 
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 This debate is underpinned by two concerns: either there is a heap of information unknown to most members of this House that supports the Minister’s decision or he has acted in haste. Uninformed debate is dangerous as are knee-jerk reactions to a few rather common problems. I have tried to track the situation just from media releases in order to see whether I could put together the pieces of the jigsaw. 
In June 2005 Mr Hausmann was appointed by Annette King to the Hawke’s Bay District Health Board despite reservations by elected board members due to potential conflicts of interest on significant contracts he would be seeking through tender with the board—we are talking about $50 million worth. The chairman claims that he asked Ms King to delay the appointment until an upcoming tender was resolved. She denies that this approach ever happened. The ministry itself gave advice to the Minister that his appointment had public perception risks but in August Mr Hausmann attended his first board meeting. Early in 2006 a whistleblower suggested that the tendering process had been compromised by Mr Hausmann and a review was instigated. The whistleblower does not appear to have been given the protection she was promised. Is this the matter that is at the core of this problem or is it just a separate matter? 
In November 2006 the district health board wrote to Minister Hodgson concerned that the formula used to calculate funding did not meet the board’s needs and said that it might need to cut services in order to stay within budget. It received no reply from the Minister but it did get a response some time later from a director of the health ministry who said that the proposed cuts would be unacceptable. In September 2007 the board wrote again to the Minister with concerns about its funding. Then in October 2007 a new board was elected—or rather the old board was re-elected—and a month later a new Minister Minister Cunliffe was appointed. In December the board tried for a third time and wrote to the Minister again about its concerns about funding. The board does not appear to have received a response from him for nearly 2 months; from my understanding it was 30 January before the board heard from him. That appears to have been the last contact the board had with the Minister until nearly the end of February when the board was issued with a week’s notice requiring some clear signals from it that it planned to improve its financial management and to improve relationships between the board the management and the Minister himself. The Minister also wanted a response from the board to the concerns of the Auditor-General. 
Those issues are interesting because like previous speakers I am aware of the track record of lots of district health boards. I am not currently on the Health Committee but in the previous Parliament I did serve on that select committee. Certainly $7.7 million worth of deficit is not a huge concern. We reviewed boards that had substantially higher deficits than that but were still considered to be competent to govern. I have also been aware of other situations where senior staff were on extended stress leave and were extended a huge amount of grace in that situation. Some of those situations concerned relationships between themselves and the board yet the board was allowed to stay intact. So I assume and hope the Minister has some additional information that will justify the step he took. 
Unhappy with the board’s response—of course a week later we know the story—the Minister fired the members of the board. I heard him on TV saying he had taken legal advice on that. Currently local bodies are considering whether to take this matter to judicial review. That is an interesting fact. In Whakatane right now we have a situation where our district council is taking the regional council to judicial review over a decision that the regional council made. I was part of a focus group that helped work towards the decision as to whether to take a judicial review. We considered whether given the ratepayers’ money that would need to be spent on it we could be pretty sure of the outcome. It was decided that yes we had legal advice that there was every reason to believe we could win the judicial review. So I assume that the legal advice currently being received by the local bodies in Hawke’s Bay is such that they will be weighing up the taking of a judicial review very seriously. I hope the Minister’s legal advice holds up for his sake.