No great surprise

The Herald reports:

Auckland Museum director Vanda Vitali, and the museum trust board are embroiled in a performance dispute, and both sides have hired top lawyers.

Auckland mayors have also become involved to “save” the director from the board, although Auckland City Mayor John Banks said the dispute appeared to be the “beginning of the end for Vanda Vitali at the Auckland War Memorial Museum”.

Dr Vitali, who has been at the centre of several controversies since being appointed museum director in September 2007, refused to discuss the dispute. She has hired John Haigh, QC.

Board chairman Dr William Randall said the board was conducting a performance review with Dr Vitali that involved a fair amount of rigorous debate over matters of concern to the board.

“It’s the frequency of them that gets to us,” he said.

“We started with the restructure – that got a lot of negative publicity – we then went on to the Bomber Command issue, then there was Passchendaele, then we had the Hillary issue and subsequent to that was the PSA issue on unions.”

There have been so many issues, I am not surprised there is a dispute and potential loss of confidence. However hard to judge from the outside if this is mainly just resistance to a tough management style, or if Vitali is making errors of judgement.