Little Andrew: Urgent Debates — Health Ministry—Financial Management of Building ProjectText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLittle Andrew: Urgent Debates — Health Ministry—Financial Management of Building Project[Sitting date: 08 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9431. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition): I move That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. The Ministry of Health is one of the biggest-spending ministries and departments in the Government so what happens with the Ministry of Health matters. That is why good oversight matters. That is why you need a Minister of Health who is focused on the job and a Minister of Finance who is not asleep at the wheel. Unfortunately we cannot say of the present Minister of Health nor of the present Minister of Finance that they are across their portfolios and that the Minister of Finance is not asleep at the wheel. This has been an absolute and utter failure of oversight by those charged with the responsibility of that oversight.A $24 million project—a $24 million refit project. That is a big project in Government yet the Ministry of Health—its officials—no doubt aided and abetted by the Minister because the Minister would know that this was going on was somehow able to persuade Cabinet that it had the funds to do this project when the funds did not exist. How does that happen—how does that happen? Now we see the real consequence of this: $18 million of the cost of this project has to be financed out of a now much-hyped rental that the ministry has to pay for its premises. It is $18 million more over 15 years. That means that its rental for its head office is now going to cost more than $1 million a year extra over the next 15 years.We know who will pay the price of that—we know who will pay the price of that. It will not be just every taxpayer; it will be the patients who yet again and for the next 15 years will go without the hospital surgery that they need and the pharmaceutical treatment that they need. That is what happens when Ministers and this Government are so arrogant and so contemptuous of their responsibilities as Ministers that they just do not care. They just let it go. They let officials from the ministry tell them: “Don’t worry we’ve got $24 million.”Did the Minister of Finance tell his officials the Secretary to the Treasury: “Could you please just go and check the balance sheet? Just check that the reserves are there please? Can you just check that they’ve got $24 million?”. No one did it. The Secretary to the Treasury aided and abetted by the Minister of course kicks for touch. He said: “No one came to us. No one told us. We’re only the Treasury. How would we know about the money that the Ministry of Health says that it’s got or that it needs?”. He does not know the Minister of Finance does not know the Minister of Health does not care and no one knows what is going on. But it does not end there. Having got the entire Cabinet to approve the whole project without the money being there they then delegated the responsibility of tying up the loose ends and making sure that it was all kosher to the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Health.This is what the Secretary to the Treasury said and how he recorded it: “In approving the business case Cabinet delegated responsibility to the Minister of Finance and the responsible agency Minister to approve final investment decisions.” It is very clear. In spite of the Prime Minister saying “There is no issue here. There’s nothing on the record. There is no evidence. There is nothing wrong.” here is the documented evidence. Here is the documented evidence of ministerial incompetence and failure. They cannot do their jobs. The one person whom we need to know is doing their job is the Minister of Finance—overseeing the spending of billions of dollars the raising of billions of dollars of taxes—and he does not care that a department one of the biggest in the country waltzes on up and says “Leave the project to us. We’ve got $24 million.” and he does not even care whether they have got it or not. That is our Minister of Finance. That is the New Zealand Minister of Finance today. He does not pay attention does not give attention to detail and lets this fiasco carry on.It gets worse—it gets worse. The Secretary to the Treasury goes on to say—and I make no judgment of it at all about whether this is a self-serving document; it may or it may not be; I make no judgment—“The approval by Cabinet was on the basis that no additional Crown funding was required and that the $24 million capital investment would be funded from cash reserves.” He goes on to say: “The Treasury was not consulted.” How does it happen—how does it happen—that a $24 million project can be given sign-off by Cabinet and Treasury does not know about it? Treasury does not know about it. Is that even possible? Is that even credible? Is it even believable?Hon Members: No.ANDREW LITTLE: No it is not—no it is not and the Government is desperately playing a dance to try to bury this and make it go away. That has been the role of the Minister of Health at least anyway.So when the fiasco became apparent what did the Government do? Anybody else—any self-respecting Minister concerned about his responsibilities and accountabilities to the taxpayer—would have thought: “Gee I’d better have a look at this. Better call in a specialist; better call in the Office of the Auditor-General because that is the specialist agency that deals with mismanagement in the public sector and with failures of management responsibility. Better go to the Auditor-General.” But what does he do? “Better not have anybody who can call us to account. We’ll call in the private sector.” because according to the National Party the private sector can do no wrong. That is why you sell Landcorp—or talk about it—at the behest of your junior party partner. So the Government calls in PricewaterhouseCoopers which does this skimpy little document that confirms what we all know just by looking at the details. It said there was serious financial mismanagement. Oh yeah? Cabinet approves $24 million that Treasury does not know about and the Ministers do not care about—we know that that is serious financial mismanagement.The question is: how on earth did that happen—how on earth did that happen? It is a disgrace. It is an absolute disgrace because what the Secretary to the Treasury then goes on to say in his most instructive memo—his aide-mémoire as he describes it—is: “The whole issue has come to light in the 2015 Budget process because the ministry does not have sufficient cash reserves.” But he goes on to say this: “Nor did the ministry have sufficient forecast cash reserves when the property consolidation”—which is the project they are talking about—“was approved by ministers in 2014.” So at the very time that the highly skilled National Cabinet—the masters of the universe the great managers of the economy the people who know everything about managing assets and capital and money—was approving this the Ministry of Health did not even have the money. It did not even have the money.Grant Robertson: What kind of incompetence is that?ANDREW LITTLE: What sheer and utter incompetence is this—what sheer and utter incompetence? It is nothing less than a total disgrace.Hon Annette King: He laughs.ANDREW LITTLE: And those members laugh about it because that is the National Party of the 21st century.Hon Annette King: Arrogant.ANDREW LITTLE: Arrogant contemptuous do not care about their responsibilities to the electorate do not care about their accountabilities to the taxpayer. Those members just do not care—they just do not care. The Secretary to the Treasury very helpfully went on to say that the ministry’s next bid demanded the equivalent of 90 percent of the department’s projected depreciation funding over the next 2 years which of course was completely impossible because as it turns out you know the ministry has got other assets that it has to depreciate including an ICT system which depreciates more rapidly.So it could not do it and do you know what the Ministry of Health then tried to do? It then tried to sort of inveigle its way in to the district health boards and say: “Forget about the district health boards for a moment. We might have an extra $200 million for their capital funding but give it to us in Wellington because we’ve made such a huge mistake that we should be rewarded for it at the expense of the district health boards around the rest of the country.”You know who the people are whom I most pity in all of this? It is the people of Dunedin—the people of Dunedin who have been waiting for an upgrade to their hospital for years. I visited that hospital last year. It is literally falling down around your ears—or my ears and they are pretty big admittedly. The hospital is falling down around their ears. It leaks. People are jammed into it. People have to have surgery in cramped and barely spacious surgical theatres. They are waiting for their hospital upgrade but they will not get it now. It will be pushed out because of the Minister of Health’s incompetence and the Minister of Finance’s failure. Will they ever front up to Dunedin do you think? Will they ever go to Dunedin and explain to the people of Dunedin: “Sorry. We’d like to give you a new hospital. We can’t because we failed to do our basic job of overseeing the officials whom we are responsible for. We are too busy scoring political points playing political games to care about what’s actually happening in health to care about what’s happening with our hospitals. We’d rather just ignore the officials ignore our job to check when officials tell us money is there that it is there. We would rather forget all that stuff because we are too busy playing political games and scoring political points.”That is what this Government has come down to and now we have reached the apotheosis—now we have reached the apotheosis—of a Government that for so long for 8 years has never taken responsibility for its own failures. It has never taken responsibility for its own incompetence. It blames everybody else. It is everybody else’s fault. I notice that when the story broke it was not the Minister who fronted up in the Westminster tradition of ministerial responsibility. The Ministers shoved out the Director-General of Health—the newish director-general and former acting director-general. They pushed him out there because he is the sacrificial lamb.Well it is not just his fault. He may have some responsibility—he may have some responsibility—but it is the Ministers ultimately who are to blame. I want to turn Bob Semple’s dictum on its head: they are not just responsible they are to blame. It was their job to make sure that their officials did their job. It was their job to ask the simple questions. “So when you say you’ve got $24 million of reserves”—because I say it does raise an obvious question when a Government department says it has got $24 million in reserves. If I were a Minister I would be asking: “Really? How much underspending have you had to do in the health sector—which is so desperately needy of cash—and for how long that leaves you with $24 million reserves?”. That is an obvious question and had the question been asked had the Ministers been doing their jobs had they asked the question—it is pretty obvious—then they would have had to be told: “Oh whoops. We do not have that money.” Then the project would not have been approved and we would not be in this situation.None of us in the Opposition likes to be in the position of pointing out to Ministers how incompetent they are. That is not good government. It is not good government when we are in that position. But it behoves us on this side of the House—it is our moral responsibility when we see such a fiasco such a farrago in Public Service management—to call this to account. We have to tell every New Zealander: “If you are wondering what has happened to your health dollar if you are wondering why you cannot get your melanoma drug treatment if you are wondering why you cannot get your surgical treatment your elective surgery look no further than the Minister of Health and the Minister of Finance who now have squandered $24 million—or at least $18 million over the next 15 years—which has to be tacked on to the Ministry of Health budget at the expense of New Zealand’s long-suffering patients.”And do you know who is going to suffer most? It is not just the people in Dunedin; it will be the elderly because we know that when it comes to health decisions and health rationing that it is always the elderly who suffer. They are the ones who miss out on the hip surgery and the knee surgery and those things that make life just a little more comfortable after a lifetime of paying their taxes. They are the people who will pay the cost of this when Ministers fail to do their job.It cannot go unnoticed and it will not go unnoticed and this House must notice that on this occasion two of the most senior Ministers presided over by a Prime Minister who has been in the job for 8 years and the New Zealand Government represented by Cabinet—the National Cabinet—have totally failed New Zealanders. They have totally failed taxpayers in New Zealand. This is not the quality of government we should expect. After 8 years you know the training wheels are long gone. The training wheels are off this lot. They know how to run a Government—or they should do. They know how to ask the questions—or they should have done. But they have got to the point now where 8 years on they have such contempt such arrogance that they no longer care anymore. They no longer care about doing a good job. They no longer care about doing their job as highly paid Ministers responsible for the public purse responsible to the people of New Zealand. It is absolutely appalling.It is absolutely appalling and now a project has been entered into it is beyond the point of no return and taxpayers will pick up the cost. Taxpayers will pick up the cost. The Secretary to the Treasury goes on to say that his recommendation was that no extra money be made available to the Ministry of Health to punish it for its failure. Well it is not just the ministry and its management that should be punished; it is the Ministers as well. They too have failed. They have failed New Zealand. They have failed every taxpayer in this country.