Goff Phil: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 14 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4352. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 The Minister of Foreign Affairs has signalled that he is going. He is going to New York to be ambassador there and believe me it cannot come too soon. This Minister was so keen to appear before the estimates committee that he turned up at 1 o’clock on the Thursday afternoon 1 hour before the House sat on the very last day of estimates! He could not have left it any longer. We had given him 6 weeks in which to appear and he chose the very last minute—and no wonder. This Minister has to go because he has made an absolute botch of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and its reorganisation—and John Hayes is wanting to nod there but he cannot quite bring himself to do it because the boss might be watching. 
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade that I remember was committed it was competent it was absolutely efficient it was professional and he took that ministry and turned it into a disillusioned and dispirited organisation in the space of 3 years. You know the ministry does a survey of how engaged its employees are. And what did that survey find? It found that 14 percent or one in nine were positive about their job at foreign affairs—14 percent. Fifty-seven percent were ambivalent—they did not know whether they still wanted to work in that organisation—and 28 percent were negative. This was a professional foreign service one of the best ministries in this country and one of the best small ministries in the world and that is Mr McCully’s legacy. And why—why? It was all to save how much? Twelve million dollars. 
Mr McCully destroyed a professional organisation to save $12 million. It is absolutely unprecedented: 49 heads of mission—we have about 53 of them—the most able and experienced civil servants we have in the foreign service wrote a letter saying that the steps Mr McCully had initiated would damage for years our ability to pursue our economic and trade interests. That was the conclusion of our top civil servants in foreign affairs. And what did he pay to do this reorganisation? Well he spent $10 million on consultants—$10 million on consultants—and seconded staff and $6 million in redundancy all to produce a crock that he had to disavow halfway through the process. He blames John Allen. Who is John Allen? John Allen is the chief executive officer of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He is a civil servant now. He cannot answer back and it is lacking in courage for any Minister to treat their chief executive officer like that. 
But what did we find in the examination in the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee? We found that long before Murray McCully owned up to knowing about it he knew that 300 people were on the line to lose their jobs he knew that 600 staff would have to reapply for their jobs he knew that the local staff in our agencies around the world were going to be sacked he knew that the allowances paid to civil servants who took their family overseas to a posting were going to be savaged and he knew that there was a plan to close down multiple European posts. That was the plan. Murray McCully knew about it from the start. He blamed John Allen but the truth of the matter is this: that plan would have gone ahead but for a full-scale rebellion on the part of our most professional civil servants and the anger and dismay of the stakeholders who knew that New Zealand’s interests in trade and security internationally depended on foreign affairs who said “This has got to stop” and they pulled the reins in on Murray McCully. 
I want to say that one other thing came out of the select committee and it was the cult of secrecy. This Minister Murray McCully was a Minister who censored two-thirds of the briefing to him as the incoming Minister of Foreign Affairs and at the select committee could not justify cutting that information out. This is the only Minister in the House who has withheld and who continues to withhold Treasury’s briefing on the portfolio responsibility.