The governing Council of Unitec Institute of Technology has recently been dissolved and a Commissioner has been appointed by the Minister of Education to run the organisation. This is the public sector equivalent of going into receivership. Unitec recently sold land to the Crown for housing developments for $134m. Even that cash injection was not enough to stave off disaster. That paid off (or down) debt, but they also lost $55m over the last two years, with another $45m of projected losses over the next two.

So, what went wrong? Well, as is so often the case, Unitec's financial woes are a symptom of their problems, not the root cause. They made mistakes, no doubt. But this series is less about recriminations made from an armchair than an attempt to identify lessons from which we all can learn.