Cécile Meier on LinkedIn: My Net Worth: Quin Henderson, Southbase Group CEO (2024)

Contractors and consultants are cashing in on public sector restructures.The Ministry of Education spent $715,000 on HR, communication, 'change' and legal contractors. Other ministries coughed up hundreds of thousands of dollars in consultant fees to assist with redundancy plans. The NZ Herald reported that the children’s ministry Oranga Tamariki paid consulting firm Deloitte and PR agency Campbell Squared Communications $800,000 for its restructuring. The Ministry for Environment paid Ernst Young consultants nearly $1m for its restructuring last year, The Post reported. The amount was almost a third of the savings the proposals were supposed to deliver ($3.5m) in the restructure’s first stage, the article said.https://lnkd.in/g6AnyVeK

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Loved this piece about (now retired) veteran investigative journalist Martin van Beynen, and really surprised to get a mention in it. I have great memories of our heated debates on feminism and other topics some may label as 'woke' when I worked at Stuff in the Press newsroom. While we disagreed on almost everything, the conversations were always fun and respectful. As Philip Matthews wrote, "in person, away from phones and screens, we are much less polarised".I wish we all could have more respectful conversations with people who hold different views, rather than staying in our echo chambers.Wishing Martin all the best for his health and his retirement.https://lnkd.in/gG2H-a56

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The line between contractor and employee has been getting blurry in the public service.The Ministry of Education has hired 24 former staff as contractors since 2018. More than half of the staffers – 13 – had finished working for the ministry less than six months before returning as contractors. Of the rest, five had finished working for the ministry less than a year before returning and two had finished less than two years previously. The ministry, which has about 4500 staff in total, said it engages contractors for “time-limited business need for specialist skills and capacity”. However, the data shows 16 staff were contracted for more than six months.This included six contractors who worked at the ministry for between 12 months and 3.7 years.One contractor was hired for three years – from 2021 to 2024 - at more than $270,000 a year.

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NZDF says it stands by its digital team spending $1.35 million on 19 two-day workshops at Wellington venues since 2019. Each quarterly event cost, on average, $71,000 – about half the total catering spending for the entire Inland Revenue Department (IRD) in the past financial year. An insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the spending was a “staggering waste of public money”.A large portion of the costs were for venue hire, which was wasteful because the events could be held at multiple NZDF facilities at no additional cost, the source said. However, NZDF said the spending was justified because the event catered to about 300 staff and business partners, and its facilities were unavailable. The workshops are part of a $182.5m IT upgrade, plagued by challenges and delays. https://lnkd.in/ggztxfTD

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Investment funds into early childhood education are thriving despite rising costs, staff shortages and inadequate government funding plaguing the sector. Milford Private Equity has shares in the growing early childhood education (ECE) chain New Shoots. PMG’s direct childcare fund, which started in 2017, has continued to generate good returns and grow its value through difficult times for the sector. After a rocky period early last year, during which it terminated two leases with the now-defunct Rainbow Corner Group, the fund increased distributions to investors in early 2024, with further increases targeted this year. Erskine Owen also has a daycare property fund, which it advertises on its website as fully subscribed with a projected cash return of 6.25% a year.The fund’s property portfolio includes multiple sites previously tenanted by the Rainbow Corner Group, which went into liquidation last year. https://lnkd.in/e_5WRA_n

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Interesting to see a company from the private sector also struggling to deliver IT projects. So it's not just government facing hurdles - BusinessDesk reported this year on MFAT, Te Whatu Ora and NZDF facing challenges and delays with similar multi-million dollar IT projects.

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Due to performance issues, big catering companies have lost dozens of free school lunch contracts. Libelle Group, the largest supplier for the Ka Ora, Ka Ako programme, has lost more than a third of the schools on its books since July 2022.And multinational Compass Group, the fourth-biggest school lunch supplier, lost more than a quarter of its school contracts in the same period.Both companies went through a performance management plan with the Ministry of Education earlier this year after schools' complaints about the quality of the food and service provided. Despite the performance issues, Libelle plans to submit a proposal to be a supplier for the alternative school lunch model, which will kick in next year. The company already has an online portal, a key requirement for the new model. BusinessDesk understands that Compass might also submit a proposal.

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Really interesting to talk to former All Black Mark Finlay, who founded a daycare chain in the early 2000s, for the second part of my investigation into the ECE sector.“There is an acceptable return on investment, but if you try to take too much, the children suffer.” His comments illustrate the tension between profits and children’s safety and wellbeing, which is at the heart of the ECE sector’s crisis.https://lnkd.in/gQUFRsXR

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