Kate MacNamara: Why Mahuta family contracts warrant scrutiny

Labour MP Nanaia Mahuta. Photo / Mark Mitchell

As we say goodbye to 2022 and welcome in 2023, it’s a good time to catch up on the very best of the Herald columnists we enjoyed reading over the last 12 months. From politics to sport, from business to entertainment and lifestyle, these are the voices and views our audience loved the most. Today it’s the top five from Kate MacNamara.

Why Mahuta family contracts warrant scrutiny - August 27

A recent history of government contracts, appointments and grants awarded to consultancies owned by family members of Labour Minister Nanaia Mahuta have come under scrutiny.

They have been brought to light, largely, through the written parliamentary questions of the opposition parties: ACT and National. And they’ve sparked considerable debate about the processes that should be followed under such circumstances.

To recap, Mahuta’s husband is Gannin Ormsby, and his consultancy, Ka Awatea Services, (solely owned since September, 2020) has been awarded two contracts and one grant, from departments or agencies for which Mahuta was an associate minister. The value topped $119,000 (excluding GST) in under two years.

Spokespeople for all three departments or agencies have said that the area of work covered by the funds or contracts did not fall under Minister Mahuta’s ministerial responsibilities.

See Kate MacNamara’s full column on the topic here

The politics behind Govt’s move to break up supermarket duopoly - September 1

The dream of breaking up New Zealand’s supermarket chains is hard to kill. On the surface of things, a plan to force the sale of parts of New Zealand’s current supermarket duopoly - Foodstuffs (New World, Pak’n Save, Four Square) and Woolworths (Countdown, Fresh Choice) - could already be in train.

Since April, David Clark, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister, has been saying that the Government may need to take more radical steps to improve weak competition in New Zealand’s grocery sector than those recommended by the Commerce Commission in its recent market study.

To that end, the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE) has commissioned a considerable chunk of “expert grocery sector advice” and “cost-benefit analysis” to explore options for forced sales.

The prompt for the Government’s sudden interest in outstripping the ComCom’s competition remedies lies in soaring inflation and the consequent erosion of the real value of wages. There’s an election next year and incumbent governments are typically ousted when households are this badly squeezed; the price of bread and butter has rarely been so political.

Read the full story here

Three Waters and how ratepayers will lose control - August 12

The control of assets is just as important as ownership, and control and ownership don’t always amount to the same thing. Most Kiwis understand this. Strangely enough, though, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern sat down with TVNZ’s Jack Tame in August and argued just the opposite.

The subject was the Government’s contentious Three Waters Reform Programme, which will transfer tens of billions of dollars’ worth of water assets – treatment plants, pipes, and drains – off the books of 67 local councils to four newly created water services entities.

Shareholding of the new entities will remain with councils, though individual councils will no longer control the assets in their region because their interest will be changed from direct ownership to shares in an agglomerated entity.

But that’s not the only way in which local control of water assets will be up-ended.

See the full column here

A ponderous start to grocery market shake-up - May 25

May’s Budget quietly contained $10.7m over four years to pay for a “dedicated team” of bureaucrats to advise the Government on how to respond to Commerce Commission market study reports.

The only such study it has in hand covers the retail grocery sector, where competition is weak, prices are perennially high and now climbing steeply, and consumers are squeaking noisily about the effect on their wallets.

Another Commission report on competition is due at the end of the year and will cover building supplies, the prices of which are also spiking, if you can get the goods at all.

The new team will be housed in the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), and it’s easier to say what it won’t do than what it will.

Read the full story here

Full extent of MIQ’s failures may never be known - April 28

This week a second court ruling struck at the legality of New Zealand’s long-running, but now largely dismantled, Managed Isolation and Quarantine system.

Grounded Kiwis won their case against the Government: elements of MIQ were illegal.

The suit presented a litany of case by case misery in the prevention of Kiwis abroad, in dire circumstances, to return to the country of their birth. They were on expired visas, without funds for healthcare during high-risk pregnancies, desperate to attend the funerals of dead relatives, and kept away from home for months on end while the lottery system of scarce vouchers shut them out time and again.

To the degree that MIQ failed to adequately weigh New Zealanders’ individual circumstances, particularly emergency circumstances, it was an unjustified limit on their right to enter the country.

But justice Jillian Mallon also spelled out her view that while the system failed many individuals, she did not reject it as a broad public health measure for avoiding and minimising sickness in a pandemic.

See Kate MacNamara’s full column here