AERIAL DRONE SURVEY

We’ll be carrying out an aerial drone survey of our network power lines over the next few months.

From April until August 2023 we will be surveying power lines across the Cambridge, Te Awamutu and Kāwhia areas.

For further information, updates on survey dates and timings for your area visit: interests register this year – but it seems some were not.

It is good that the Audit Department has drawn attention to the issue, that Cambridge News has published the story and that readers have taken it seriously.

From my experience, the risk of minor breaches being ignored or minimised is that a culture can develop in the organisation that some rules don’t matter.

When that happens, the list of rules that the staff believe don’t matter can spread slowly but steadily. Staff and councillors need to believe that all rules matter and to act on that belief. If there is a rule that the staff think is inappropriate or difficult to implement, they don’t have the right to ignore it. The appropriate response is to go to the person or body that set the rule and give them the reasons why the rule should be changed or dropped.

Early in my tenure of the position of governor of the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Head of the Bank’s Foreign Reserves Department breached one of the investment guidelines set by the board. It was not a serious breach but the response of the person was completely the wrong one. He said the breach didn’t matter as the institution he had invested more of our reserves in than the limit permitted was a strong one. In order to convince not just him but all of the bank staff that all rules set by the board did matter, I demoted him and shifted him to another department. We had no more breaches of these investment guidelines in the seven and a half years that I was governor.