Heather du Plessis-Allan: We got away lightly with Kāinga Ora's leadership change

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

Now, onto the outgoing boss of Kāinga Ora and his $365,000 pay-out to leave - no surprise here, but the tone that’s been adopted on that is that it’s massive. Mega. Eye-watering.

No it’s not, that's tiny for a CEO. That's only half his annual salary, that's not a lot.

When Tony Gibson quit the Ports of Auckland, he was on $820,000 a year, which is not that much more than the boss of Kāinga Ora - he got a pay-out of about $1 million.

When Kevin Kenrick left TVNZ, he was on a salary of $560,000. That's less than the boss of Kāinga Ora and he got a pay-out of $2 million.

Now it's not always apples and apples and I concede that, because there will be all kinds of weird little payments like holiday pay and bonuses and stuff like that in there.

But the point I'm trying to make is that a payout for a CEO of only half their salary is us getting away lightly to get rid of the guy.

And that is obviously what happened. It's pretty clear he didn't decide he wanted to quit, the new chair Simon Moutter sat down with him and clearly told him to quit - Simon didn’t even try to deny that when he was on the show with us last night.

If you’re basically going to fire someone at CEO level, this is small change to get the job done.

Now, as for this nonsense about him being given redundancy because the scope of his job had changed - that's just BS. That's just the technicality they’ve used to get rid of the guy.

Because he had to go. He ran an organisation that refused to evict thugs, that ran up huge amounts of debt, that that bid and paid way more than market value for property and frankly lost the confidence of the public.

I don't want to be spending nearly $400,000 of taxpayer money on something like this, but to get rid of a CEO who needs to go, I reckon we got away lightly.

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