Te Whatu Ora has astounding news for Otepoti. Due to an unbudgeted income bonanza, the department can offer your new hospital three extra wards, a brain surgeon, a cancer radiothingy, and 306 pie warmers.
Three weeks ago a Nigerian prince emailed our 2nd Assistant Secretary offering $50 million to free up His Highness’s frozen $100 million family bequest. The prince needed us to process his share through a Kiwi bank. (He doesn’t trust African ones.)
Money for jam! We immediately sent Prince Ronaldo Umbichuck $20,000 to help him with transfer costs.
Our $50 million was due last week, but the prince tells us he now needs another $17,000 to attend a ceremonial cheque handover to the PM.
This will all be for your benefit. So can your southern contacts pony up this extra 17K? Otherwise, the Umbichuck Bequest may have to go to The Royal College of Tattooists. (Their Kiwi Teen-Tats proposal is impressive).
George Drone (her, him).
Media Outreach.
Dunedin is delighted to help.
Please give us three days to locate our cheque book, which was last seen in either the garage, or the children’s tree house.
Are you sure the prince spells Umbichuck with the "k?" There was no "k" when he emailed me. But perhaps that was his cousin?
Dear Uncle Norm,
It seems each week brings another axe-blow to Dunedin hospital plans.
A ward gone here, a surgery there, next a lifesaving piece of equipment.
What happened to New Zealand’s ability to build infrastructure?
Where is the small country that left us its huge hydro dams, its roads, and railways?
It’s lost.
We’ve become bigger, yet less able to maintain the infrastructure our forebears built for us, let alone expand it.
Why have we become so useless?
Disillusioned.
Kiwis could have the hospitals and roads they deserve, were our governments not squandering wastrels. Each year they spend billions on "services" we neither need nor asked for.
Government is like the idiot sibling who blows the family’s inheritance. It relentlessly expands into areas that seem shiny, virtuous, or politically convenient — but are as essential as a bath duck.
Every dollar spent foolishly is a dollar that can’t be spent wisely.
Families know that to afford the "must haves", we must limit the "nice to haves". We still understand the value of money. But governments no longer have any sense of the sweat, sacrifice, and risk that creates the money it taxes.
How much do we really need (say) the New Zealand Walking Access Commission, the Pacific Ambassador for Gender Equality, Drug Free Sport NZ, and the never- ending Pike River Recovery Agency?
Why spent $51 million deciding a $785 million Auckland harbour cycle/walkway mightn’t make sense? $2.5 billion will be found somewhere for council "compensations" if Three Waters pushes on.
Is it vital that Willie Jackson blows $350 million merging TVNZ and Radio NZ? Should Health, which can’t pay nurses enough, be presently hiring a "Project Manager for Gender Affirming"?
Why is the average public service wage 24% higher than the private sector’s?
NZ Initiative research concludes that one in three dollars our governments spend gets wasted. That’s roughly $20 billion a year. Or a dozen Dunedin hospitals.
Unfortunately, each of New Zealand’s 32 "core" departments sits inside a castle whose walls can be chipped at, but never pulled down.
Common sense says government has over-reached its range of duties. But in these times, common sense barks at the moon.
Dear Uncle Norm,
Maori Development Minister Nanaia Mahuta remains adamant that proper form was followed when four consulting contracts worth $237,000 were given to the businesses of her husband Gannin Ormsby, and his nephew and niece.
The plum deals were allocated without competing quotes. But the Public Services Commission inquiry into the contracts won’t investigate politicians, or whether the work was needed.
This is incredible. Surely it fails The Pub Test?
Citizen, Woke-apoti.
That’s true. And too little attention is paid to whether some of these expensive consultancies could conceivably return any value.
$90,000 of the pot was for finding a Maori view on waste disposal strategy. This investigation would, we now learn, hire a ropu (a group) of "three wise heads" — plus the two younger Ormsbys who, for about $65,000, were to act as "the pen" for said wise heads.
But what modern Maori will see rubbish disposal strategy any differently? And why waste money asking?
The New Zealand Herald’s Kate MacNamara wrote a neat expose of the silliness. She revealed the Ormsby’s "three wise heads" plan to draw upon counsel from the legends of Maui. These myths will offer our wise heads "guiding winds" to fill the "sails" of waste strategy.
What? The irony is that the Maori Development Minister’s family gig perfectly illustrates some of the more convincing reservations about co-governance.
— John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
