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Ryan Bridge: Should we be worried about the business of business cases? · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

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  Speaker 1: Should we be a little worried this morning about the
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  Speaker 1: business of business cases? David Siemil from ACT kicked up
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: of fuss about the Wycutter University Doctors School cost. He
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  Speaker 1: said the cost was out of whack based on a
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  Speaker 1: poor quality business case, and he seems to have been
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  Speaker 1: proven correct, does he not? Why else would the cost
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  Speaker 1: of the taxpayer have shrunk from two hundred and eighty
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  Speaker 1: million dollars to eighty million dollars a two hundred million
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  Speaker 1: dollar saving if he was right, and he's one guy
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  Speaker 1: at the cabinet table. How many other business cases don't
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  Speaker 1: stack up? There's an entire lucrative business case industry in Wellington.
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  Speaker 1: Some of the workers done in house by government departments,
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  Speaker 1: of course, but much of it is outsourced to the
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  Speaker 1: private sector. Can we trust these reports? MB had a
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  Speaker 1: business case train wreck a few years back. You might
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  Speaker 1: remember this. They were calculating the benefits of hosting events
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  Speaker 1: like the World Dance Championships, and questions from the media,
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  Speaker 1: they went back and redid their sums. Realized they had
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  Speaker 1: been in directly calculating the cost benefit analyses of events
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  Speaker 1: for two years. More than a dozen applications had to
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  Speaker 1: be fixed. We've recently had scraps over the benefits of
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  Speaker 1: four laning, two fung aday and this is a problem
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  Speaker 1: because if we can't trust the numbers we're basing decisions on,
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  Speaker 1: then how can we make proper decisions. I hope the
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  Speaker 1: Wykota Uni Med School is a success. They say it'll
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  Speaker 1: train in extra one hundred and twenty doctors a year.
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  Speaker 1: That sounds fantastic, but there are three signs this is
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  Speaker 1: a risk of becoming a white elephant project for the government.
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  Speaker 1: One other unis say they could have done it cheaper. Two,
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  Speaker 1: Wykata Uni has tons of its own money and the
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  Speaker 1: ability to tap into debt. Why aren't they funding it?
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  Speaker 1: And three the business case was clearly a bit shonky
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  Speaker 1: to begin with. For more from Early Edition with Ryan Bridge,
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: listen live to News Talks at b from five am weekdays,
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  Speaker 1: or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.