Fuses are blowing from the Premier’s office over “Healthway-gate”.
Freebie tickets to the some of the best sporting events in Perth have been enjoyed by the board, management and staff of the government agency – along with their families and friends. It was wrong to use the tickets and they should have known it.
The nub of the rub is a matter of ethics: the misused tickets, and the many that haven’t been accounted for, means that tickets to the best seats for the Wildcats, the Glory, cricket at the WACA and other events were effectively subsidised by us, the taxpayers.
We paid for parking, comfy seats in the corporate boxes and the champers.
What’s got the Premier steaming is that the board was among the frequent offenders for the freebies and he says its members should have known better.
There seems no doubt that Healthway has not effectively managed the hospitality element of its sponsorship arrangements, but what is the real extent of the problem as highlighted in the PSC report?
Let’s have a fresh look at the numbers.
The total dollars of “hospitality tickets” under scrutiny, over four years, is $220,000. There’s no dispute that 43 per cent of those tickets were for legitimate business purposes. We can safely take $94,600 off the table.
What seems to have got people annoyed is that the board, senior management, staff, family and friends benefited from hospitality to the tune of $46,200. Lax ticket tracking by Healthway, as identified by the PSC investigation, has been unable to account for a further $79,200.
We can reasonably say, then, that a total of $125,400 is at the centre of the outrage and that sum represents tickets definitely and most likely enjoyed by “Team Healthway”. There has been no suggestion that the unaccounted for element ($79,200) was used in an improper way like online ticket resale. In all likelihood, someone was probably just handing out tickets willy-nilly because they simply didn’t have the help to effectively manage the process.
The Public Sector Code of Ethics requires public sector bodies to “ensure that any hospitality resource acquired through a sponsorship arrangement is properly authorised, is used for effective business purposes and that the value and use of that resource is properly accounted for”.
Now, let’s look more closely at our contentious $125,400. That’s an average of $31,350 per annum over four years – around $600 worth of tickets per week.
In the private sector, that modest sum might translate as an employee rewards program, a way of recognising a job well done, but the unauthorised use of public funds for a private benefit is why Healthway-gate is on the nose with the Premier.
A Pandora’s Box may have been opened with other agencies now on-notice to show squeaky clean ledgers where they have been exposed to ticketed hospitality. And it also puts a question mark over the funding of other events where a benefit might accrue. I wonder who’s going to pay for the Premier and Cabinet Christmas party?