KEY POINTS:
Health Minister David Cunliffe professes to be satisfied with the damning findings of the independent review of Hawkes Bay's troubled district health board.
Satisfied? Cunliffe should be satisfied - deliriously so. If his Beehive office were not so cramped he would have been excused performing cartwheels across it.
The report of the independent panel established by the Ministry of Health under instruction from the previous health minister, Pete Hodgson, vindicates Cunliffe's decision to sack the board and bring in a commissioner.
The protagonists can keep arguing over the detail of who was right or wrong in the ugly wrangling that followed Annette King's appointment of Peter Hausmann to the board.
There will be continuing questions as to why the panel has made changes between its initial draft report and the final version released today.
But that ignores the bigger picture. The report confirms what we already knew. The board was in a mess. Likewise its relations with senior management, the Ministry of Health and ultimately the minister himself.
Such was the shambles that the panel would have recommended the minister appoint a Crown monitor to keep a check on the board's affairs - a less extreme option than a commissioner, but still serious intervention.
Cunliffe's critics will also find it difficult to argue conspiracy theories that the report amounts to a Government-directed whitewash.
To do so impugns the integrity of the panel's heavy duty membership which is well acquainted with both the running of DHBs and the responsibilities of board members.
They would hardly risk their reputations to save politicians' necks.
They have anyway adopted something of a "plague on all your houses" tone towards the participants.
Hausmann does not escape criticism. Some will think he should have received much more. But the panel emphasis on his failure to disclose matters of material interest has to be seen in the context of the board's lax procedures for dealing with conflicts of interest.
Rather than focusing solely on Hausmann, the panel made a shrewd move in examining the board's handling of a separate conflict of interest among its membership and found things similarly wanting.
That the Hausmann case was not the only example of the board's weak systems failing to meet even the most simple test of good governance lends credibility to the panel's findings.
As a result, the board as a whole, and its chairman Kevin Atkinson in particular, cop the full blast of the panel for failing to adequately handle conflicts of interest and for interfering in operational matters to such an extent there was a "culture of mistrust and dysfunction" between the board and senior management.
While Cunliffe can claim to have been vindicated, King, however, cannot claim to have been cleared by the report in terms of the wisdom of appointing Hausmann to the board.
Determining that it was outside the scope of its terms of reference, the panel rejected the board's request to examine King's role.
Much to Labour's relief, the report should go a long way towards killing off the whole sorry business as a political issue outside the boundaries of the Hawkes Bay DHB.
