Ooh, let today be a warning to public servants considering trying to get one over Erica Stanford: they may want to rethink that approach and play with a straight bat instead, because Erica Stanford is not one to be trifled with.
Today, she has thrown her officials - her migration officials in particular - under the bus by revealing that they wasted more than $30 million on a biometrics data system that never actually materialised.
What’s worse than wasting taxpayer money, though, is the dark arts they practised in trying to hide what was going on.
They withheld information from ministers. They deliberately fudged numbers to keep the project cost down and under the threshold that would have required Cabinet sign-off.
They removed people from the project if those people raised concerns about it - and there was plenty to be concerned about.
There were cost overruns, delays to the go-live date, and problems with what this tech upgrade could actually do.
Now, we do have to acknowledge that these are Erica Stanford’s allegations, as laid out in a report she has made public today. We haven’t heard - and probably will never hear - an official response denying what she has said.
But this is believable, isn’t it? The idea that public servants might try to hide things from their ministers and frustrate what the elected Government wants to do. It’s believable because we see it around the world
It’s a huge problem in the UK, in what they call “the blob” - their public service.
And we’ve seen it here. We’ve seen it play out over the last two and a half years in particular, most notably when the Government made it clear that race-based or special treatment was to stop.
But health officials in Hawke’s Bay ignored that and made GP visits free for kids of only two ethnicities and no others, even though the Government had made its position clear. They decided they knew better.
The problem with the public service, in general, is that too many think they run the place. They were there before these ministers were elected; they’ll be there after these ministers are gone. They think they know what we need, they know how to work the system, and so they do.
And Erica Stanford, on the available evidence, has just busted them doing it. She hasn’t told us anything we didn’t already suspect was happening - but it is refreshing to have it laid bare like this.
LISTEN ABOVE
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
