Debbie Ngarewa-Harris And The Risk Facing The Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency?

Who Will Take Out 'Old Yeller' First.

In the quintessentially 90's film, New Jack City, crack cocaine kingpin Nino Brown (played brilliantly by a menacing and charismatic Wesley Snipes) boosts his reputation around his neighbourhood by handing out free turkeys on Thanksgiving.

The neighbourhood eats it up (sorry).

Nino is a villain, he brutally kills people and deals a ruinous drug in his own already struggling community, but in this one gesture he shows an appreciation of the value of good public relations.

Nino appreciates that he's a public figure, even if he’s an infamous one, and he needs some positives to slightly counterbalance the many negatives.

In the corporate world, one would describe this tension, the one between serving a community and merely profiting off it, as a battle to earn and protect an organisation's ‘social licence’ to practice.

When you add contracts with government agencies into this mix, the status of one's social licence takes on an existential importance.

This fear might be why Te Pati Maori [TPM] leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer wrote an Op/Ed for the NZ Herald last week called “Whānau Ora, we need certainty of its future".

To save you the click, here's my summation:

Public pressure for transparency around The Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency is working.

This upsets Ngarewa-Packer because National never specifically ran on an election campaign promise to review whether the three Whānau Ora commissioning agencies should retain their roles as intermediaries between central government and community based health and social support services.

The Op/Ed then conflates the entire history of the Whanau Ora policy, one passed by a John Key-led government, with that of (only) one of three commissioning agencies, the one run by Te Pati Maori's largest single donor (by a long ways).

Finally, it asks the reader to thank Te Pati Maori, not the-then Maori Party, for a government policy's successes. Payment in silent awe preferred.

This is what Nino Brown was hoping for too - here's a free meal, don't ask too many questions around whether I'm doing other, less virtuous things, on the side.

As a political or public relations action, it's Checkers-like.

It is a tacit acknowledgement of the overly close relationship between Te Pati Maori and The Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency that has gotten both parties into trouble with the public in the first place, it also shows an acknowledgement that recent scrutiny has both now on the defensive.

The Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency has suffered a torrid few months of bad press, this is an attempt to turn that tide a little bit. To remind people of the proverbial turkeys.

What it fails to acknowledge is that there is no evidence the current coalition government is seeking to repeal the Whānau Ora policy, only reasonable speculation that the current commissioning agencies may be reviewed given repeated public scandals coming from only one of the three.

The other two commissioning agencies, who are both widely regarded as apolitical and just as effective, aren't engaging in media campaigns like this.

That speaks volumes, probably more than intended. Real ‘one dimensional chess’ stuff, this.

It sounds a lot like the media and political pressure on Te Pati Maori to separate itself from the Tamihere fiefdom has started working.

How could it not at this point, as we're talking about an agency that exists as a middle-man, a bag handler, that could be easily replaced without outcomes for actual humans being significantly affected.

Questions around whether it largely exists to provide extra taxpayer funding to a parliamentary political party need to be answered, but they shouldn't have come up in the first place.

This was all avoidable. It was easily foreseeable too.

I will be cautious with my words here: The Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency has clearly lost its social licence to operate, whether its done anything legally wrong or not.

This was maybe the inevitable outcome when the decision was made to involve the fiefdom in the first place, but it's gotten to an inflection point now.

As reported by Matt Nippert in the NZ Herald two days ago, the Charities Registration Board is now investigating political donations stemming from the Waipareira Trust and ending up with Te Pati Maori.

The timing of this all is not coincidental. The status quo can't continue. Nino Brown-esqe goodwill tactics won't work forever.

In their final line, whoever wrote the column for Ngarewa-Packer said "a whānau-centric approach has been very successful in breaking cycles of inequity that have plagued our people for generations."

This has been true, there is good evidence that Whānau Ora as a policy has been a resounding success, but this is also a strawman.

The weakness of both Te Pati Maori and the Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency is that they're too centred around one whānau, to such a detriment that untangling the mess may irreparably both and will lead to worse outcomes for the people they're being entrusted to support.

Without the dark cloud that is John Tamihere hanging over all of this, Whānau Ora is a good news story and Waipareira is a charity.

Last time I wrote about the Tamihere fiefdom I compared him to Pablo Escobar.

Pablo, or Nino Brown, a charismatic film character played by 90's Wesley Snipes - before the b-roles done to pay off the taxman, in that brief moment when he was a serious possible Oscar contender - are all far to generous for this, late-era JT.

A diminished force, the closer comparison now would be Joe Biden - someone who doesn't know when to quit, unable and unwilling to put others' futures above his present.

In this comparison, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer would be Kamala Harris - both have the future and the present fates of their respective party's in their hands.

Will Ngarewa-Packer show the leadership Harris has so far failed to?

No free kai will be enough to launder the reputational damage of all this if not.