Did Justice Ministry Bosses Need to Use Their Own Power Balls?
By John Bowie
It took the Ministry of Justice five years, and somewhere between $500,000 and $550,000 of public money, to do what a competent employer might have done regarding an employee facing serious criminal charges, in a fortnight over alleged money laundering by a profile employee. If not in an eye-blink.
We can only wonder whether the employment of Russell Harrison, the money laundering staffer, could have been extended by another five years and another half-million if he had faced more serious charges, like say a plot to orchestrate a mass murder or – to quote the current vox populi, a local ‘genocide’.
Presumably the Ministry’s chiefs would continue to clutch their pearls and emit bodily fluids as they decide what to do, whilst at the same time keeping the under-watch employee on full pay. It was a Lotto win for the Harrison and a void draw for the ball-less bosses.
The Public Service Commission’s rapid Performance Improvement Review was released on 12 November. It was conducted by Debbie Francis and Steve Haszard and triggered by the case of Harrison, the former Lotto presenter joined the Ministry as a Family Court ‘navigator’ (no we don’t know what they do, either) on 21 June 2021.
Days later he was charged over a money laundering operation linked to an international drug ring and was suspended on full pay and stayed that way until June this year, when he pleaded guilty and was finally dismissed.
The reviewers found clear contractual grounds to end his employment. Instead, for five years, leaders accepted flawed internal advice that nothing could happen until the criminal case was over. Senior leaders, including Secretary for Justice Andrew Kibblewhite, (left) who reportedly “owns” the desperately negative report – they are ‘sobering and challenging’ he says – but has no intension of resigning, looked at the suspension on multiple occasions but for reasons best known to themselves, no-one made the call.
The legal advice trap
The review’s diagnosis is a culture of risk avoidance rather than risk management. Staff described a Ministry that would go to great lengths to avoid a legal dispute, and that was preoccupied with the prospect of appearing in its own courts for possible legal error. So the very Ministry that runs the courts was too wary of litigation to deal with an employee charged with laundering money for a drug ring.
Lawyers advise on risk on a daily basis, but they should not become the place where decisions go to die. The reviewers’ observation that nobody appreciated that not deciding might be the worst decision of all.
Advice that treats a pending prosecution as an automatic bar to employment action is incomplete at best. And executives who shelter behind advice instead of testing it are not managing risk in any way whatever. If anything, risk is being outsourced.
Bigger than Harrison
The reviewers treated Harrison as a symptom of wider problems including hierarchical and defensive leadership, staff concerns that failed to reach decision-makers, an exhausted workforce and, remarkably, apparently no executive dedicated to the District Court, the busiest court in Australasia.
The Ministry points to Te Au Reka, the digital case management system due to start in the Christchurch and Ashburton Family Court on 23 November, as evidence of change. Given that project’s own history of delays, lawyers let alone taxpayers may reserve judgement on that given the ability of government to balls-up major software systems – think the almost $100 million police Incis disaster at the end of last cerntury and the more recent $60 million Immigration NZ debacle.
The Post reported that the draft findings had prompted a tense exchange between Kibblewhite and Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche.
The review was ordered by Paul Goldsmith, now the outgoing Justice Minister as coalition talks continue after the 7 November election and arrives just weeks after New Zealand slipped from fifth to seventh in the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index.
Decent lawyer would know that good advice involves setting the options and the costs of each, including the cost of waiting.
For public servants, avoiding a decision is still a decision. And this one just cost the taxpayers half a million dollars.
