2010/11 Board Appointment Activity

COMU is responsible for assisting responsible Ministers manage Board member appointment and reappointment processes. At year's end, this included 50 Boards covering 12 ministerial portfolios (note that for five of these entities COMU is not involved in performance monitoring, and they are not included in the "Entity Performance" pages at the back of this report).

Three new Boards were added to COMU's responsibilities during the financial year; Health Benefits Limited (Minister of Health), Crown Fibre Holdings Limited (Minister of SOEs) and the New Zealand Productivity Commission (Minister of Finance). The 2025 Taskforce was dis-established.

Further information on the Boards included, and the appointments process, is available on COMU's website. COMU maintains an online database for people interested in Crown governance roles. Anyone interested can register online at www.boardappointments.co.nz

During the year, amongst the Boards COMU is responsible for, there were:

58 retirements of individual Board members (56 in the previous year)
36 reappointments of serving directors to the same position (28 in the previous year), and
80 new appointments, or elevations of serving directors to Chair or Deputy Chair roles (90 in the previous year).

New Chairs

The portfolio has seen a number of new Chair appointments during 2010/11, and two that were agreed during the financial year, but took effect after the end of the financial year. These are noted in Table 10.

Table 10 - New Chair appointments
Entity	New Chair	Retiring Chair
Airways Corporation of New Zealand Ltd	Susan Paterson*	Con Anastasiou
AsureQuality Ltd	Janine Smith	John Spencer
Government Superannuation Fund Authority	Keith Taylor	Tim McGuinness
Health Benefits Ltd	Ted van Arkel	N/A - new company
Industrial Research Ltd	Michael Ludbrook*	Keith McConnell
Meridian Energy Ltd	Chris Moller	Wayne Boyd
New Zealand Post Ltd	Hon Dr Michael Cullen	Rt Hon Jim Bolger
New Zealand Productivity Commission	Dr Murray Sherwin	N/A - new entity
New Zealand Railways Corporation	John Spencer	Rt Hon Jim Bolger
Radio New Zealand Ltd	Richard Griffin	Christine Grice
The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Ltd	Michael Ahie	Jim McLean
Timberlands West Coast Ltd	Dr Russ Ballard	Martin Sawyers
Transpower New Zealand Ltd	Mark Verbiest	Wayne Brown

* appointment took effect after 1 July 2011

Board demographics

The breakdown of the Boards COMU is responsible for is as follows (the 2009/10 figures cover the 48 Boards covered by COMU at the beginning of the year; the 2010/11 figures include three new Boards - Crown Fibre Holdings Limited, Health Benefits Limited and New Zealand Productivity Commission).

Table 11 - Demographic breakdown, as at 1 July 2010
Ethnicity	Female	Male	Total
European	28.5% (81)	58.5% (166)	87.0% (247)
Maori	3.2% (9)	6.0% (17)	9.2% (26)
Pacific Peoples	0% (0)	0.4% (1)	0.4% (1)
Chinese	0.3% (1)	1.4% (4)	1.7% (5)
Other/Unspecified	0.7% (2)	1.1% (3)	1.8% (5)
Total	32.7% (93)	67.3% (191)	100% (284)

Table 12 - Demographic breakdown, as at 30 June 2011
Ethnicity	Female	Male	Total
European	29.3% (86)	57.8% (170)	87.1% (256)
Maori	4.1% (12)	5.4% (16)	9.5% (28)
Pacific Peoples	0% (0)	0.3% (1)	0.3% (1)
Chinese	0.6% (2)	1.4% (4)	2.0% (6)
Other/Unspecified	0.3% (1)	0.7% (2)	1.0% (3)
Total	34.4% (101)	65.6% (193)	100% (294)

Table 13 - Regional distribution of directors
Region	At 1 July 2010	At 30 June 2011
Northland	1.4% (4)	0.3% (1)
Auckland	33.8% (96)	35.4% (104)
Waikato	5.6% (16)	4.4% (13)
Bay of Plenty	4.2% (12)	4.1% (12)
East Cape	0.7% (2)	0.7% (2)
Hawke's Bay	2.8% (8)	3.1 % (9)
Taranaki	0.4% (1)	0.3% (1)
Manawatu-Whanganui	1.8% (5)	1.4% (4)
Wellington	25.7% (73)	24.8% (73)
Tasman	-	0.3% (1)
Nelson	2.1% (6)	2.0% (6)
Marlborough	0.7% (2)	0.7% (2)
West Coast	0.4% (1)	0.3% (1)
Canterbury	11.3% (32)	13.3% (39)
Otago	4.2% (12)	5.1% (15)
Southland	1.4% (4)	1.4% (4)
Overseas	3.5% (10)	2.4% (7)