Kerre McIvor: Housing purse strings too loose

The good people of Oamaru didn't feel the need to travel to China to buy their Christmas lights. Photo / Getty Images

I was fulminating on my talkback show this week about Housing New Zealand's announcement it would be paying the Government a $118 million dividend, the biggest in five years.

It seemed a cumbersome way of doing things, I argued. And that's if you accept that a social housing provider should be making a profit.

I certainly think HNZ should be efficient but if you're making a profit providing homes to people in need, then surely you're doing it wrong.

My first caller of the evening, Michael, couldn't have disagreed more. He said aiming for dividends kept state servants honest. Didn't I remember the bad old days, he asked, when Government departments spent money simply to use up their budgets?

Heaven forbid you came in under budget! Then you wouldn't get the same amount next year. And I do remember those days. The first thing I learned as a young reporter at the Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand was to always ensure my production budget was just slightly over by a couple of hundred dollars so budgets for filming trips wouldn't be cut.

And if that meant money that had come from taxpayers was spent on "entertainment" at the finest restaurant in town, so be it. I agreed with my caller we wouldn't want a repeat of those days but, I insisted, those days are long gone.

In the end, Michael and I agreed to differ but within 24 hours, I realised he was quite right.

Invercargill City Council was the catalyst. The council has sent four staff to China to buy Christmas lights.

Its old lights are on the blink so the finance director (who has experience in China and will conduct negotiations), the roading manager (to check the lights from an engineering point of view), a graphic designer (to choose the lights), and the parks manager (for outdoor lights) are off to China.

How many council staff does it take to change fairy lights? Four - but only when ratepayers are footing the bill.

The good people of Oamaru didn't feel the need to travel to China to buy their Christmas lights. They ordered theirs online, apparently, and they sparkled away prettily in the town centre.

It's absurd. And then I remembered the Wellington City Council and its high-minded, gloriously principled decision to pay all council staff a living wage.

There was much self-congratulation from the mayor and councillors when that noble clause was written into contracts - but the hypocrisy of at least a couple of councillors was breathtaking.

Both were small-business owners and when asked whether they paid their own staff a living wage, they said they couldn't afford it.

They wouldn't take money out of their own profits, but could when it came to ratepayer dollars.

Then there was the audit of the Kohanga Reo National Trust Board and the subsequent Serious Fraud Office investigation that found gross mismanagement; the Whanau Ora programme that is doing great things but is less than transparent when it comes to accounting.

There are plenty more. These are just the organisations funded by public money that have been in the news over the past couple of weeks.

My caller was right. We haven't learned anything over the past 40 years.

Unless managers are made to be accountable for every dollar they spend, they begin to live in an alternative universe where they don't have to earn money or generate income.

They don't have to get up in the dark in sub-zero temperatures to milk cows or work through the night cleaning offices to get the money to pay the bills.

State and council civil servants need to remember their budgets come from the pockets of everyday New Zealanders.

And it's only right and proper they answer to them.