Or not

The words in the title to this post were uttered by (outgoing) Public Service Commissioner Peter Hughes in a press release issued a month ago today.

You might recall the story:

• the outgoing head of the Ministry of Pacific People’s (MPP) Mr Leauanae was given a lavish farewell (costing taxpayers $40000) before he moved down the road to run another second-tier government department (the Ministry of Culture and Heritage (MCH)), where he was given another fairly OTT official welcome,
• instead of being given a card and a couple of book vouchers (say), Mr Leauanae was given lavish personal gifts, $7500 of which was paid for by taxpayers (via MPP), this at a function where the then Minister of Pacific Peoples was an attendee (and apparently a speaker)
• for his welcome at MCH, attended by several Cabinet minister, his former ministry (MPP) spent $4100 on travel costs for Mr Leauanae’s family and personal guests.

I wrote a couple of posts about it here and here, and then lodged some OIA requests.

The PSC could be read as a fairly stern rebuke in some ways. It included lines that MPP’s expenditure had not been “moderate and conservative”, and had not complied with either MPP’s own policies or PSC’s “model standards” for chief executives. He added that “taken together, the Ministry of Pacific People’s expenditure on the farewell and the welcome were an inappropriate use of public money”.

And yet the principal culprit, Mr Leauanae, seemed to pay no price at all (nor is there anything suggesting his underlings at MPP did). He was the culprit in two senses: first, he was the chief executive of MPP and so personally responsible for its policies, key people, institutional culture, and so on. It happened on his watch in an agency which, while bloated, is still small in absolute terms (about 130 staff), and, second, he knowingly received the gifts and the travel.

But Hughes is keen to emphasise that it was all paid back and to suggest it was done pronto. These are the quotes from his press statement:

“On being made aware of the money spent on gifts he immediately repaid the $7,500 and returned all the gifts.”

“He has since reimbursed MPP $4,115.38 for travel costs associated with all family members and guests.”

“When he became aware of the matter, he immediately repaid the money spent on gifts in full and returned all cultural gifts to MPP. He also repaid the money spent on travel for his family and a guest who did not have a formal role in the welcome. That is appropriate and I thank Mr Leauanae for putting the matter right at the first opportunity.”

If you read those quotes carefully you will see an implied difference in timing as to when the two amounts were returned, but the press release ends on that note “I thank Mr Leauanae for putting the matter right at the first opportunity”.

But he didn’t. And the evidence, from PSC’s OIA response, leaves no room for doubt on the matter.

The farewell from MPP was on 14 October last year and the welcome to MCH was the following Monday, 17 October.

So let’s suppose that not knowing anything about taxpayer-funded expensive gifts in advance, Leauanae is embarrassed to receive them on the 14th. Not wanting to embarrass people on the spot, he reluctantly takes them, but vows to quietly return then straight away. Perhaps his family members never told him they’d got free tickets to welcome (doesn’t seem very likely, but just grant the possibility for the moment) and he only finds out on the Monday morning of the welcome, and again resolves to put things right straight away.

When then would you consider the latest that reimbursement could have been made and the Peter Hughes description (“put the matter right at the first opportunity”) would still have been valid. For me, I can’t see how anything later than the close of business on the Monday (14 October) could be described that way. Perhaps you are more generous than I am and allow a few more days leeway.

What actually happened was nothing of the sort. Instead Mr Leauanae took the expensive gifts, took the travel for family and friends, and got on with his new, somewhat bigger, government chief executive role.

And PSC (and ministers) did nothing. As the PSC report tells it, it wasn’t until 19 December (more than two months later) that PSC decided to have a look at things, and then only because there had been an OIA request to MPP about the expense of the farewell, and MPP have copied their response to the OIA to PSC. This in itself is all quite extraordinary, and suggestive of a PSC that simply wasn’t doing a decent job itself. We are told that Hughes himself was not at the farewell but some of his staff were. We know the Minister of Pacific Peoples was, and material MPP has provided suggest one other public sector CE probably spoke at the event (it would be quite normal for a bunch of senior public servants to be at such a CE farewell, even if he was only moving down the road). And either no one expressed any concern about (a) the lavish event, or (b) the gifts or PSC knew and didn’t care, at least until the issue looked as though it might go public via the OIA.

Christmas intervened and the PSC investigation didn’t get started until mid-January when they wrote to the acting CE of MPP.

To drag the story out, by this point three months on from the events, Mr Leauanae had taken no steps at all to return gifts or reimburse the money. The final Hughes report notes, of the travel expenditure, “He [Leauanae] advised it was always his intention to pay for his family and personal guest’s travel costs”, but not only had he not done so, he seemed to have later untroubled by any qualms of conscience. He’d done nothing to reimburse the cost of that travel.

The inquiry into the MPP farewell took PSC a while, but eventually the investigation led to Mr Leauanae returning the gifts and repaid the amount of taxpayers’ money that had been spent on them ($7500). The documents PSC released to me show that the money was repaid on 3 March and the gifts were returned on 7 March. That was six weeks or so after the investigation got underway, almost five months after the event. Only Peter Hughes could consider that to be “at the first opportunity”.

I had asked PSC to justify the “at the first opportunity” statement – not then knowing the dates. They simply refused to answer, claiming that the justification is in the report, which it isn’t (including because the report does not use the phrase, which appears only in the Hughes press release).

But there is still the travel for the MCH welcome to consider. Having been caught out and presumably rather strongly “encouraged” to return the gifts and reimburse the cost, you might have thought that an honourable man – the sort of person we might want to entrust the running of a government department – would have said “oh, and by the way, MPP actully paid for some family travel for my MCH welcome. I guess I shouldn’t have taken that either, and I’ll reimburse that cost today too”.

An honourable person might have done that. Leauanae didn’t.

In fact, at this point PSC was not even aware that taxpayers’ money had been used to pay for the family travel to the MCH welcome. The whole MPP inquiry seems to have been wrapped up – although strangely not released to the public as they had told MPP in January they intended to do – when on 19 June (months later) Hughes decided to expand the scope of the review to examine both MPP and MCH expenditure on the welcome. A copy of the Hughes letter to Leauanae (as head of MCH) is on the PSC website.

But not even that seems to have prompted Mr Leauanae to think “gee, I really should have got on and reimbursed that family travel we never should have accepted. I’ll put the payment through now”.

Because it was not for another month, on 24 July, that Leauanae finally reimbursed MPP for that travel.

And Hughes wants us to believe that it had all been sorted out and reimbursed at the first opportunity. In fact his underling (who signed the OIA response) repeats what is obviously false, re the farewell spending, that “upon being made aware of the expenditure, the outgoing Secretary returned all the gifts and reimbursed the Ministry”.

He just didn’t. Here is PSC’s own little table from the OIA response.

I’d also requested from PSC copies of any contacts with Mr Leauanae seeking these reimbursements. I half imagined something pretty stern and reproachful. It was after all wildly inappropriate for this money to have been spent on him and his family, and he was still (and is) a serving public sector CEO, in a public sector whose Commissioner is fond of emphasising not a culture of entitlement or of what one can get away with but the “spirit of service”.

I suppose it is just possible their response is to some clever reinterpretation of my request to enable them to hide stuff. But PSC did not tell me that they were withholding anything, so we must take them at their word that these were all the communications.

There is this text from Leauanae to Heather Baggott (a deputy SSC Commissioner, who as it happens had been acting CE at MCH when the expensive welcome was being put together)

So they’d had a really good chat. Months on. And Baggott’s response is also provided

And that’s it apparently for the farewell spending. No reproach, no reprimand, just a good chat among the chaps, all cleared up and no harm no foul.

For the family travel expenditure it is even worse. There is apparently nothing in writing at all from PSC. There is simply this one liner from Leauanae to an Assistant Commissioner at PSC.

Notice his very careful wording. He reimbursed MPP as soon as they told him the dollar amount that had been spent. But that doesn’t even come close to matching the Peter Hughes description “I thank Mr Leauanae for putting the matter right at the first opportunity”. No, it was months later, in two stages, with no evidence of anything proactive from Leauanae himself.

In a country with high standards of integrity (let alone frugality) in its government and public service the whole thing should be just astonishing and almost unimaginable. We no longer have that in New Zealand. Even so, what was known when the story first broke still prompted considerable public and political blowback. Who has $40000 farewells, and expensive welcomes, especially when it is just a public servant transferring from one agency to another? Who takes lavish personal gifts and unauthorised family travel, even if later they reimburse the money?

But there are plenty of other questions. How did the lead public sector agency (PSC) – responsible for public sector standards and especially the conduct and performance of CEs – allow all this to happen, and how was it that it didn’t even launch an investigation for more than two months after the events? How is it that there appears to have no black mark against Leauanae’s professional standing, and he still holds a CE job, despite behaviour that in junior staffer would probably have been met with dismissal? Where is the government in all this? Ministers were at both events, and are now well aware of the PSC report. Is this really acceptable behaviour from a government department CE in this day and age – or are both frugality and basic ethical standards just tossed out the window?

And why did Peter Hughes simply lie to and actively mislead the public? Reread the post if you think those words are too strong. The farewell expenditure/gifts were not returned/reimbursed “immediately Leauanae became aware of the matter” but months later, weeks after even the inquiry started, and the MCH welcome spending wasn’t reimbursed for several more months later. None of it was done ‘at the first opportunity’ as if there had just been some unfortunate and very brief, almost pardonable, misunderstanding. None of that is revealed in the report Hughes had had carefully constructed or in his press release. Nothing, it seems, must be allowed to damage the image of one of his CEs.

It is simply dishonest and disgraceful. Responsibility for the PSC Commissioner rests with the Minister (Little) and the Prime Minister (Hipkins, who was himself minister until January).

I’ve never had anything to do directly with Hughes. My closest encounter was in 2019. I’d made a mistake in a post here about outgoing Treasury Secretary Gabs Makhlouf, stating that Hughes had been responsible for his reappointment. I was quite surprised to get a phone call that evening from SSC’s comms guy stating that “Peter has asked me to ensure that you are aware that that reappointment was made by [his predecessor] Iain Rennie” (and I of course corrected the post).

But the Leauanae affair and what should really be called the Hughes affair – actively misrepresenting things in a public statement – appear to be all on Hughes himself.