If They Didn’t Like What Was Happening Employees Were Told to ‘Get off the bus’
Anonymous* There are fresh revelations about the NZTA’s dubious work on developing new transport technologies, which details how NZTA officials under Fergus Gammie made astonishing and over the top promises about the potential for certain types of transport technologies they were wanting to invest substantial public funds into.
These revelations, such as this RNZ report, follows a damning audit of the NZTA’s
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However Gammie quickly prevented this from happening. In a direct confrontation with senior legal staff at the NZTA, he stopped the agreed changes to the financial delegations being made. Access to the Board was strictly controlled, so they were never informed of this failure. This meant that Fergus remained able to spend significant amounts of money without going to the Board for approval.
‘Innovative change’ appears to have been pushed through without applying expected practices. This included examples of pushing through recruitment processes, disregarding advice and consultation with corporate procurement and instances where conflicts of interest have not been proactively declared or managed appropriately. – Deloitte Report
Top NZTA Lawyer Resigns
As a result the Chief Legal Officer at the NZTA resigned, and not long after and the legal section was moved to another floor, away from its former location immediately outside Gammie’s office. They were also now routinely bypassed in decision-making – following the “value-chain” style of working Gammie introduced into the NZTA.
McMullans Apps
McMullan’s vision included the development of Apps to run the transport system. Using around $20 million a year of money reallocated from highway safety projects, the two Apps launched in Queenstown and Auckland were over-hyped as reducing congestion and contributing to road safety.
“Get Off The Bus”
Those who raised concerns about McMullan or Gammie were soon moved on from the NZTA. Gammie once told a meeting of senior leaders at the Agency that ‘those with concerns, questions or hesitations abut the NZTA’s new direction should – Get Off the Bus’.
Exit Packages and NDAs
During his time as Chief Executive Gammie began to aggressively use exit packages, coupled with Non Disclosure Agreements to move people on and settle the many disputes now underway. The coverage of these NDAs were broad in ensuring former staff would not talk to anyone, even their partners, about their time at NZTA. This included what they saw, what they raised concerns about and how they were treated. As a result some former staff were unable to participate in the subsequent audits and government reviews of the Agency for fear of prosecution by the NZTA for being in breach of their NDAs. As long as former staff at NZTA are gagged from talking about what transpired at the NZTA, the full truth about how much public money was squandered on ‘revolutionary Apps’ may never be known.
Read More . .
NZTA’s Disastrous App Experiment: Fiddling While People Died
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