Former Te Pūkenga chief executive Peter Winder declined to release the details of severance pay made to several of the agency's executives; in turn his severance pay was withheld, initially, by the current chief executive, Gus Gilmore.
Former Te Pūkenga chief executive Peter Winder declined to release the details of severance pay made to several of the agency's executives; in turn his severance pay was withheld, initially, by the current chief executive, Gus Gilmore.
THREE KEY FACTS:
Te Pūkenga was established in 2020 as a mega-polytech which combined 16 polytechs and nine Industry Training Organisations
Three executives left and received redundancy payouts
Te Pūkenga is now due to be disaggregated back into many of its constituent parts
Kate MacNamara is a South Island-based journalist with a focus on policy, public spending and investigations. She spent a decade at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before moving to New Zealand. She joined the Herald in 2020.
The Public Purse is a fortnightly Herald column focusedon the public sector and how taxpayer money is spent.
The previous two Governments have been characterised by a series of very large and costly reform programmes, whatever you think of their benefits.
And leading those reforms were a group of well-paid but inconsistently successful executives, many of whom were previously employed in the public sector and many of whom enjoyed large pay bumps in their new work.
As the new Government scraps and winds down a number of these programmes – think, for example, of the Māori Health Authority, Auckland Light Rail and the Three Waters reforms – it is reasonable for the public to ask what has been paid to these executives on their way out the door.
Te Pūkenga, the mega-polytech which combined the country’s 16 technology institutes and polytechnics and nine Industry Training Organisations, has been swapping out its executives for several years – it was established in 2020 but struggled ever since to meet performance benchmarks.
As such, it offers a lesson in where the right balance lies in protecting individual employees’ private information and the public interest in transparency and accountability in how its funds are spent. The polytech appears to have often got this weighting wrong in deciding whether or not to publicly confirm and detail severance payments, but the case study is no less useful for it.
Requests were made under the Official Information Act (OIA) for the severance payments made to three of its executives - chief executive Stephen Town, who left for unexplained reasons in August 2022; deputy chief executive Vaughan Payne, who left in December 2022 as a result of a leadership team restructuring, and who quickly took up a job of establishment chief executive of one of the then Government’s new water services entities; and Peter Winder, who was made redundant by reason of the new Government’s decision to disestablish Te Pūkenga, formally announced in December 2023.
Former Te Pūkenga chief executive Stephen Town (centre) received $195,075 in severance in 2022. The agency declined to confirm the payment for 10 months until the Ombudsman's involvement.
Responding to each request, Te Pūkenga, also known as the New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology, failed to find that the public interest in transparency outweighed the executives’ rights to privacy and the organisation’s obligation of confidence: the size of the payments was withheld, and in two instances the fact of the payments was also withheld.
In all instances, the Ombudsman’s office began investigations and Te Pūkenga reconsidered its original decisions and confirmed the size of each severance payment.
Town received a negotiated payout “in lieu of notice” of $195,075. Payne received a redundancy payout of $98,250. And Winder received a redundancy payout of $163,383.
Winder, the most recent case, was made redundant in mid-December. In February, the Herald made an OIA request for the value of redundancy paid to him.
It’s worth noting that the starting point for considering any request for official information is the principle of availability: the information must be provided on request unless there is a good reason for withholding it.
Te Pūkenga confirmed that a redundancy payment was made but withheld the size. It cited the need to protect Winder’s privacy and the need to protect information “which is subject to an obligation of confidence”, where making the information available “would be likely to otherwise damage the public interest”. The relevant sections of the OIA are 9(2)(a) and 9(2)(ba)(ii).
But these don’t confer an absolute obligation of confidence or right to privacy. The act says that if a countervailing public interest in release weighs more heavily than the reasons to withhold the information, the information must be released.
“Public interest” is not defined, but it is essentially equivalent to the idea of the public good, or what is in the best interests of society.
In asking the Ombudsman to investigate the Winder decision, the Herald argued: “There is a strong public interest in knowing how the chiefs of Te Pukenga have been paid, and indeed in knowing how much they have been paid to stand aside. The money being spent is public money. And the roles are for leadership of an organisation that has stumbled through a series of cost blowouts and now, after just a few years’ existence, is to be dissolved.”
Te Pūkenga is awash in public money: establishment was lubricated by some $121 million; $40m quickly followed for capital funding; and it is otherwise funded overwhelmingly by Crown transfers.
In April, the Ombudsman began investigating two Te Pūkenga refusals made to the Herald: the Winder refusal of 2024, and the Payne refusal of mid-2023, which relied generally on the same need to protect privacy – in the case of Payne, the size and even the fact of a redundancy payment was withheld.
The Ombudsman asked Te Pūkenga to provide the reasons for its decisions and it may also have provided the polytech with precedent rulings or guidance which might steer a reconsideration, but investigations are private so the Herald’s visibility of the process is limited.
The Ombudsman may have pointed out (as it did in the often-cited case 176475), that the privacy interests of public servants, as they relate to severance payments, generally reduce the more senior the individuals are in an organisation’s hierarchy.
There are also numerous cases wherein either the Ombudsman or the High Court has found a high public interest in the disclosure of information that allows the public to see how its money is being spent. The Ombudsman may have pointed to these, many of which are referenced in his “public interest guide” of 2019.
In May, Te Pūkenga reversed course and released details of both the Winder and Payne severance payments.
It was not a surprise. The decision broadly mirrors a 2023 reversal by Te Pūkenga in releasing details of the $195,000 “negotiated settlement” it paid to Town.
Te Pūkenga never made public its OIA responses related to Town’s severance, and asked last week by the Herald to provide them, a spokesperson said they could not quickly be located.
But it’s likely the organisation also relied on the protection of privacy in this case too. In 2022, then-chair Murray Strong told media organisations he would not discuss details of Town’s departure for privacy reasons.
Te Pūkenga is now due to be disaggregated back into many of its constituent parts, and much of the time and effort expended on the centralisation effort will have been wasted. But perhaps the entity can still leave a useful legacy of warning to other public agencies inclined to secrecy in the face of considerable countervailing public interest.
