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Curiouser and Curiouser (1)

15/09/2018
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There is a somewhat Alice in Wonderland aspect to the whole Curran,Handley,Ardern imbroglio that’s reminiscent of the surreal Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

mad_hatters_teaparty_tenniel

This thought was sparked by a series of tweets from Hamish Price starting with

then these:

Then from Metro (H/T Kiwiblog) we find this in an July/August 2016 article on Derek Handley:

The first that New Zealand Drug Foundation executive director Ross Bell knew of Handley was when an email appeared in his inbox a couple of years ago inviting him to dinner. “We get a lot of odd emails. I was going to put it in the trash basket but I Googled his name and thought, what’s this millionaire doing?” says Bell.

The dinner turned out to be a fancy affair in the private dining room at Euro. It was the second of Handley’s salon dinners, where he gets a range of people together to debate a topic. The guests included lawyer Mai Chen, a sales rep from a big alcohol company, broadcasters Clarke Gayford and Brooke Howard-Smith, someone from New Plymouth-based International Volunteer HQ, young law graduates and MP Jacinda Ardern, who made a presentation on Labour policy after the entrée was served. 

Scoop had this on 24 August this year

Ardern revealed that Handley is still in the hunt for the CTO position in her statement on Curran’s demotion.

“I want to express my sincere apologies to Mr Handley who has been brought into this issue through no fault of his own,” Ardern said. “He is a qualified and capable candidate who has made it through to the final stages of the appointment process based on his talent, experience. The issue is entirely about the minister’s conduct, not Mr Handley’s.”

Note Ardern is reported as revealing  Handley was still in the hunt. In Adam’s opinion, Ardern was saying Handley had not been appointed.

Plus Nicholas Jones, again on 24 August, in the NZ Herald reported

The State Services Commission will examine the CTO appointment process to ensure the Handley-Curran meeting had no bearing on process or outcome. The SCC will report back before the appointment is made.

Handley remains a candidate for the CTO position. An appointment is expected to be made shortly.

Again we see clearly that media were given guidance that the SSC would examine the process, no appointment had been made and that Handley was still only a candidate.

and Handley used LinkedIn for a piece, dated 14th August 2018, in which he wrote

One month ago I was offered and accepted the position as the first Chief Technology Officer for New Zealand. I felt deeply grateful and incredibly privileged for this important responsibility to help shape the future of our country. I have for many years repeated that we are in need of a clearer vision and roadmap as to how we will navigate the technological transformations and opportunities ahead, many of which will be brought upon us from outside of New Zealand’s borders.

Earlier this week I was deeply disappointed to learn that the Government will no longer follow through with their commitment and will not be making that appointment at this time. However, given the unnecessary and sustained lack of transparency around the process and building pressure to rethink the approach, their decision to stop the process is understandable.

So 10 days before Ardern’s statement of 24th August 2018 and reporting that no decision had been made and that Handley was only a candidate we have Handley claiming in a published statement claiming that he had accepted the job.

It seems likely that the decision to offer the job to Handley was made at least a couple of days earlier, as surely Curran or whoever made the offer would have had to obtain some sort of sign-off for such as appointment from Ardern and/or Cabinet given the nature of the position. Surely such a job was not just at the discretion of Curran?

Then we have this from Friday September 14, reported on One News that Handley is to be paid $107k by the government for not proceeding with their commitment.

Unfortunately in the article on the One News website there is no verbatim transcript of what Megan Woods said, but in the clip it is clear, see Adam’s tweet below:

 

Megan Woods clearly states the coalition received legal advice that they should pay compensation.

So we have a riddle? Is there an answer?

Or are there just a lot of as yet unanswered questions. One question though does immediately come to mind as the late Senator Howard Baker famously said during the Watergate hearings:-

Fast forward to New Zealand today and we should be asking:

‘What does the Prime Minister know about this appointment and when did she know it’

It is very clear to Adam even if not to the cheerleading Ardern media fanclub, that Jacinda Ardern is extremely economical with the truth.

Her claims of open and transparent are better translated as closed and opaque.

Her protestations of listening are more correctly described as totally deaf.

from → Ethics, Governance, History, Jobs, Labour Party NZ, Leadership, Management, Media, New Zealand, News, Politics, Uncategorized
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