Polity: The buck stops with Hekia

• notices and features
• 10 years ago
• Categories: Hekia parata
• Tags: Kohanga Reo, polity

Just when you think that Hekia Parata couldn’t make more of a shambolic mess of the Kohanga Reo review, it turns out that she could and did. Rob Salmond at Polity (and Audrey Young of the Herald) has a look at it.



Audrey Young in your New Zealand Herald reports this morning on the shambolic way the Ernst & Young inquiry into Kohanga Reo spending was put together:

Two key players in the $90,000 Ernst & Young review of Te Kohanga Reo National Trust have contradictory views about what the terms of reference allowed the review to do.

The Ministry of Education says the terms of reference were worded with the explicit purpose of looking at the trust’s subsidiary company, Te Pataka Ohanga (TPO) and the money it got from the ministry-funded trust.

But the Ernst & Young partner who conducted the review, Grant Taylor, told the Herald he would have looked at TPO if the terms of reference had made that clear…

The terms of reference were agreed in October last year between Education Minister Hekia Parata, Maori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples and Te Kohanga Reo National Trust after claims of misspending were aired on Maori Television’s Native Affairs.

This is quite ridiculous.

If you can’t agree what a report was supposed to do, even after the report has / has not done it, then there has been a massive failure of communication.

The one person who was in the negotiations over the Terms of Reference and was also in possession of the Ministry of Education’s advice was Hekia Parata, the Minister of Education.

Parata also has a hard-won reputation for being terrible at communicating.

It seems pretty clear what happened here:

1. The Ministry told Parata “make sure money that ultimately went to TPO is included in the review.”
2. Parata told the Kohanga Reo Trust: “deliverable outcome best practice international benchmark “forensic monetary auTPOsy” consultative iterative discursive framework, OK?”
3. The Trust said “we agree to excluding money that ended up with TPO.”

The buck for this communication failure stops at the top, with Hekia Parata.

(Cue Parata: “The buck stops [points in random direction] right over there.”)