THE PRESS SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1987. The management of Mana

Press, 21 November 1987, Page 22

THE PRESS SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1987. The management of Mana

Still smarting from the embarrassments of the Maori loans affair, the Maori Affairs Department may be forgiven a certain aversion to submitting details of its financial transactions for public scrutiny. The money that the department spends comes from the taxpayers. Although the day of reckoning can be postponed, accountability cannot be avoided altogether. Thus it was that the Secretary of• Maori Affairs, Dr Tamati Reedy, faced unrelenting examination about the Mana Enterprises scheme at a meeting of Parliament’s Select Committee on Maori Affairs this week.

In the last financial year Dr Reedy’s department allocated more than $ll.B million to the Mana Enterprises scheme. This venture capital is transferred to Maori tribal, urban, and regional groups to dispense by way of loans, as they see fit, to Maori business undertakings, individuals, or groups. Last year was the first that the scheme was administered by Dr Reedy’s department; for the first two years of its existence the scheme was administered by the Board of Maori Affairs and was funded through the Department of Labour Vote. Dr Reedy was called on this week for more detail on how the scheme was working since being transferred to his department, and for more detail on the projects which had been funded by it.

One reason for the questions was that the department’s own annual accounts for the year to March 31 this year are still incomplete and unaudited. The accounts, which were supposed to have been with the Audit Office by July 31, are expected to be ready for audit by December 1. At the Select Committee meeting this week, however, Dr Reedy took the line that much of the Information sought by Opposition members of, Parliament was confidential and would not

appear in the annual accounts. Decisions on loams and what interest rate should be paid were made by tribal authorities, and the information was not in the public domain. Quite apart from the curious assertion that general information on how public money is spent is not the public’s business, the attempt at secrecy was a nonsense. A Wellington newspaper, the “Dominion,” last' month obtained a summary of Mana loans from 1985 until October, 1987, that gave details of the size and terms of all loans to Maori businesses through the scheme as well as a description of the enterprises involved, each grouped according to the individual tribal or regional authorities that authorised the loan. Thus it is known that the loans made under the scheme range from $400,000 — to .a group embarking on controlled temperature farming in a venture that provided five fulltime jobs — to as little as $1000; that interest rates have been set from about 5 per cent to 17.5 per cent; and that the ventures range from lunch-bars to laundrettes. Dr Reedy and his officials finally were' persuaded to present this degree of detail officially to the committee next week, but only after they had been shown that this was precisely the sort of information provided through the office of the Minister of Employment when the Labour Department funded the scheme. Such intractability hardly squares with the notions of open government. It creates suspicions where frank disclosure of the facts could show that suspicion was not warranted. Such evasiveness must make it. harder to convince the public of the wisdom of the department’s present crusade to devolve upon non-governmental Maori stewardship a greater control of public; money available for specifically Maori needs.