> The report found “monthly financial reporting usually took 12-15 days to consolidate and five days to analyse.”
> It gets worse: Health Minister Simeon Brown last week delivered a speech in which he said HNZ operates “an estimated 6,000 applications and 100 digital networks” – or roughly one application for every 16 staff members.
> He also said HNZ’s Senior Leadership Team members “have only just begun weekly in-person meetings, and have continued to operate from different offices, despite the majority living in Auckland and the organization being two and a half years old.” Most work in different buildings.
> However the Minister doesn’t have a plan to get off Excel, or fix HNZ’s tech leadership woes.
HNZ's Senior Leadership should be reassigned to clearing fatbergs from sewer mains, and some competent grownups brought in.
And probably similar, further up in the NZ government. Two and a half years is how long it took for the 1940's USA to go from Pearl Harbor to D-Day.
It’s not going well. But keep in mind that running down the public sector and privatising it is their aim. Simeon Brown is a terrible choice for minister and takes some pretty shitty positions for someone in his position.
Also see ‘the financial black hole’ that ACC was supposedly in when John Key came along. It’s the playbook being played.
Don’t look to the US for guidance though, that healthcare system and that political direction is going to be fascinating to look at in two and a half years.
Don't accept anything Simeon Brown says without a healthy dose of skepticism, he's talking shit up for political reasons, like some people in the USA are doing right now.
And if you do choose to accept it as unvarnished truth, welp, that's an ideological choice, not a rational choice.
The current government would dearly like to bring in more private providers to our healthcare systems, so are following the classic neoliberal playbook.
1) Underfund public services
2) Point out how poorly they're performing
3) Bring in private companies to do it "more efficiently"
4) Pay them the money that you refused to pay the public service. And then some more.
5) Private companies make bank
6) Services further worsen.
7) But hey, shareholder value was great.
If you want an example of this, just research the history of our railway system.
Or, you know, the last National government when the Minister of Health directed funding for surgery from the public system to the private system.
And then resigned to become the CEO of a private healthcare company.
Which is why when NZ comes in the top 3 of "least corrupt" countries, I painfully point out that we're in the top 3 of _perceived to be_ least corrupt countries.
Once again, The debacle that was NZRail -> TranzRail -> Toll -> KiwiRail is illustrative.
Toll, an Australian company, ran down our rail network even harder than TranzRail did, and then forced the government to buy it off them at a massive premium by threatening to just shutter our entire rail system.
And we gave fucking knighthoods to the two merchant bankers who advised the government to sell NZ Rail... _and then bought it_ in a consortium with an American company which asset stripped it and then chose not to maintain the railway lines because it provided them a significant tax write-off in it the US on accounts of depreciation or similar.
And of course, Sir Fay and Sir Richwhite now reside in overseas tax havens, although IIRC one of them still owns an entire island here.
Oh, and the NZ government had to pay for the release of one of their children when they were detained driving through Iran for their Instagram account about how everyone is kind.
Ah, neoliberalism.
(As you can tell, I have some strong feelings on this. Because I lived through it. Was it all bad? No. It gave us one of the most efficient agricultural sectors in the world.
Was it mostly bad? Well, inequality surged upwards in conjunction with neoliberal policies. So, yes.)
>Don't accept anything Simeon Brown says without a healthy dose of skepticism, he's talking shit up for political reasons, like some people in the USA are doing right now.
Like you are doing now?
>neoliberal playbook
Hardly. They've made almost no changes to the policies of the previous government, which increased the size of the public service by around 25%. They haven't even dropped it back by 20%!
The rest of your comment is very conspiratorial and repeats the sort of trite anti-capitalist sentiments that you see on places like /r/NewZealand. Hardly fitting for a tech forum like this one.
>Sir Fay and Sir Richwhite
You reveal yourself. No native New Zealand/Commonwealth/British English speaker would refer to someone as 'Sir [last name]'. There is no such person as 'Sir Fay' (he's 'Sir Michael Fay' or 'Sir Michael') and there's certainly no such person as 'Sir Richwhite' because David Richwhite didn't receive a knighthood.
As far as I can tell from their wikipedia pages, Sir Michael Fay lives in New Zealand and David Richwhite lives in London. Hardly tax havens. They own an island near Whitianga which they're doing conservation work on.
>(As you can tell, I have some strong feelings on this. Because I lived through it. Was it all bad? No. It gave us one of the most efficient agricultural sectors in the world. Was it mostly bad? Well, inequality surged upwards in conjunction with neoliberal policies. So, yes.)
Yes let's please go back to carless days once a week and having to apply to the government to be able to import foreign magazines. Let's go back to assembling Japanese cars in New Zealand because of stupid tariffs. Let's go back to making things here again, inefficiently, so there is no consumer choice, unless you like choosing between one or two domestic assemblers of goods really made overseas anyway.
Let's go back to not having state-owned enterprises but having them all be run as government departments within the civil service. What a great system that was, very efficient.
New Zealand is far better off because of those reforms. It has made everyone much richer. We are less equal than we were, but so what? Would you rather we were all equally poor or that we were all richer but some were richer than others?
>Oh, and the NZ government had to pay for the release of one of their children when they were detained driving through Iran for their Instagram account about how everyone is kind. Ah, neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is when embassies help their citizens... or something?
Because I don't really get the niceties of titles, I'm not a Kiwi? Lol, tu meke bro.
> The rest of your comment is very conspiratorial and repeats the sort of trite anti-capitalist sentiments that you see on places like /r/NewZealand. Hardly fitting for a tech forum like this one.
It's what they did in the 90s, and it's what they are doing now. Obviously I'm not yearning for the days of Muldoon, and I acknowledged that the reforms have made our agricultural sector incredibly competitive. But you pretend like it didn't also do a lot of damage and saw critical national infrastructure asset stripped.
I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings by having an opinion different to yours or saying mean things about the political parties you support, but I'm allowed to have my own opinions.
> It gets worse: Health Minister Simeon Brown last week delivered a speech in which he said HNZ operates “an estimated 6,000 applications and 100 digital networks” – or roughly one application for every 16 staff members.
> He also said HNZ’s Senior Leadership Team members “have only just begun weekly in-person meetings, and have continued to operate from different offices, despite the majority living in Auckland and the organization being two and a half years old.” Most work in different buildings.
> However the Minister doesn’t have a plan to get off Excel, or fix HNZ’s tech leadership woes.
HNZ's Senior Leadership should be reassigned to clearing fatbergs from sewer mains, and some competent grownups brought in.
And probably similar, further up in the NZ government. Two and a half years is how long it took for the 1940's USA to go from Pearl Harbor to D-Day.