Armstrong puts it in context

John Armstrong puts the Mary-Anne Thompson issue into context of what responsibility Ministers have:

Try as he might, though, Cullen’s assurances to Parliament on Wednesday were never going to negate National’s assertion that Cabinet ministers were aware of the improper conduct by the head of the Department of Labour’s Immigration Service for months but did nothing about it until public exposure of that conduct forced some action.

It would be going far too far to say there has been a cover-up by ministers in the normal meaning of the term – a deliberate and sustained attempt to conceal what has really been going on.

But neither did those ministers go out of their way to reveal what had been going on.

Neither the Labour Department nor the State Services Commission felt any compunction to inform the public of last year’s inquiry into what was an astonishing breach of public service standards by someone running a major branch of a government department.

This is part of the wider problem in the public service, and the Government. The main focus has been on keeping things quiet and how to “politically manage” serious issues rather than actually confronting the core problems, and subjecting them to public scrutiny.

Ministers should have insisted that these breaches of law and policy be made public. They could have blanked out the names of staff involved.

Were it not for some concerted digging by journalists, the public would still be completely unaware of Thompson’s blatant conflict of interest in filling out residency application forms for close relatives. She would still have her job.

Once the details of the Thompson affair broke through the bureaucratic wall of silence, the two Cabinet ministers who already knew about the investigation inevitably looked complicit in officials’ inept and shoddy handling of the matter.

I think there is a growing realisation that one cannot trust internal inquiries anymore. National should seriously look at a replacement to the Serious Fraud Office which can also investigate the Government. I’ll post more on this at some later stage.

This has been an appalling week for Labour, with high-profile job losses, appalling retail sales data, the failure to be totally upfront about how much was paid to buy back the country’s rail services, further equivocation from Cullen on tax cuts just days out from the Budget, and yet another death knell-sounding opinion poll.

But hey Labour are helping with housing affordability a – a bold scheme to help oh 700 families out of the 1.5 million families in NZ!