The Mood of the Boardroom
How a bunch of right-wing grifters played no small part in the implosion of the Canterbury District Health Board
I was going to write something about the crisis at the CDHB last week, before COVID-19 re-emerged and took all of the nation’s attention. In the time since, there have been two further resignations, bringing the number of people to have quit the CDHB’s executive team to 7 from a possible 11. There has been some excellent reporting on the situation. If you aren’t quite sure what I’m talking about, then the best overview is an episode of the Detail, which features former Press reporter Oliver Lewis, who has been covering the situation for much of his time at the paper. A long piece from Dr Ian Powell, formerly of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (aka the senior doctor’s union) does a great job of placing the struggles of the CDHB into a national context. This is a crisis that has been developing for a number of years, under successive governments.
One aspect that I don’t think has been given enough attention is the current board itself. Specifically, the grifters who have managed to get themselves elected, and are now responsible for this mess. The CDHB has 7 elected members, and 4 who were appointed by the government. Of the 7 who were elected last year, 3 of them are also Christchurch City Councillors. Cr Aaron Keown has been on the board for a number of terms now. He first got elected after a campaign where he put billboards around town (many of them illegally) that screamed FREE PARKING AT THE HOSPITAL. Now it probably won’t surprise you, especially if you have been following the rest of Keown’s political career, that the CDHB doesn’t have any ability to set the pricing of on-street parking, and that in his multiple terms on the CDHB has not managed to make any progress on his single campaign promise.
Joining Keown at the board table after the most recent elections were Jamie (“James”) Gough and Catherine Chu. As you might be aware, these two are also sitting city councillors, and both ran for the DHB under the umbrella of the centre-right “Independent Citizens” grouping. The DHB elections have been a joke for some time - and STV election where you have to rank 20-something people that you’ve never heard of from best to worst. Name recognition is critical. I don’t know what happened, but I’d hazard a guess that Keown asked some of his mates whether they wanted an extra $30k for doing next to nothing and not being held accountable for it.
None of the three have any skills or background in health that seem to make them particularly suited to the role. If you google “Jamie Gough” and “cancer” the first result is from when the Councillor was kicked out of a Cancer Society charity ball for being too drunk. Back in March, Keown returned from a scriptwriting workshop in the US (!) and failed to self-isolate, despite it being requested for all returnees at that time. He also shared a post suggesting that COVID wasn’t that bad, which suggests he doesn’t have the required critical skills to evaluate the information required to run his own facebook account, let alone an organisation as big and complicated and important as a health board.
You could argue that because of their experience in governance at the council, they have skills that can be used to help run the CDHB. You could make that argument, and we’d have next to no ability to try and investigate it. If you look back at the minutes of the board of the CDHB, almost without fail, the board moves into public excluded. Here is a representative part of the minutes from February:
I understand that there will sometimes be things discussed of a commercially sensitive nature that may require discretion to be applied. But the way in which the CDHB board is relying on public excluded is beyond taking the piss. The public elects these people, the public pays these people, and these people, without fail, choose to exclude the public that they represent from their decision making. In a functioning democratic system, we would vote these assholes out at the next possible opportunity, but unfortunately the DHB elections generate almost no media or public interest. So these assholes can once again run for office, promising to do things that they know they can’t deliver, and know that they will face no repercussions for their failure.
Because of the recidivist use of public excluded, we don’t really know what was being said at board, and how it fed into the current crisis. However, there are some things we do know. We know that there was tension between the executive team and the board. The executive team had been pushing for a works program that would meet the growing health needs of the Canterbury region. The board had been arguing for a much reduced works program, despite it providing a new building that would already be over-capacity by the time it was opened. The executive produced a cost-cutting plan that would cut $56m from the budget; the board demanded they find twice the savings. From what we know of Keown, Gough, and Chu at Council, they are part of the right-wing group of councillors who routinely oppose rates rises and look to ‘find savings’ by proposing cutting to essential services like, y’know, libraries, pools, and art galleries. So it doesn’t seem a stretch to assume that they would have been promoting the same sort of myopic, cost-cutting agenda at the CDHB board. It is clear that the implosion of the executive leadership team was due to the board prioritising cost-cutting over patient care.
Before she was recruited to be part of the COVID response, Heather Simpson had spent two years working on a report on the state of the health system. One of the recommendations was the removal of elected boards. The removal of the elected CDHB board can’t come soon enough - they have led to one of the most complete failures of governance in recent local body history, in the middle of a pandemic, in a region that has faced constant health challenges over the last decade. Beyond them just being sacked, this should also be a stain on the political careers of Gough, Keown, and Chu. We can only hope that the electorate that put them onto the board and the council will remember this clusterfuck the next times they put their names forward for office.