His comment came near the end of the one and a-quarter hour public section of the board's first meeting yesterday, when member Dr Branko Sijnja said Mr Butterfield had "shot through" the agenda so quickly he had overlooked declaring an interest in the section endorsing the register of recent contracts.
Smiling, Mr Butterfield told him, "You've got something to learn - that was slow."
Revisiting the contracts register, Mr Butterfield said he considered there was no reason Dr Sijnja would have had to be barred from voting. There had been no discussion and the board was just endorsing contracts already signed.
Richard Thomson said he was not entirely happy with that view, saying some of those who had been "through a process" with the Minister of Health had a "slightly different view".
Mr Butterfield questioned the process of endorsement of the contracts register, saying he knew of at least three boards that did not have this information supplied to them.
If management had the delegated authority to do something, why was the board endorsing it?To which Mr Thomson replied: "Michael Swann had delegated authority to do things."
(Swann, a former employee of the Otago District Health Board, is serving a jail term for defrauding the board of $16.9 million. Mr Thomson was sacked as chairman of the board last year by Health Minister Tony Ryall, who said he was seeking accountability for the fraud.)Mr Butterfield asked that the contracts register practice be referred to the board's audit, finance and risk management committee to see if it was the correct process.
Mr Butterfield, who is a past chairman of the South Canterbury board, noted there were far more conflicts of interest "around this table" than he had been used to in the past.
At the beginning of the meeting, Mr Butterfield outlined how he wished formal motions to be proposed, but said he could not remember when he had needed to refer to the procedure because he tried to get decisions made by consensus.
He said he hoped people would learn "at least to tolerate" his style and to feel comfortable, adding he would find it hard to change his spots.
The make-up of committees is not yet known, but Mr Butterfield said he would not sit on any public advisory committees.
He saw the chairman's role as keeping an eye on the performance of committees and "kick bum" if they were not working.
While next year's meeting times are yet to be settled, the draft schedule shows that as well as meeting in Dunedin and Invercargill, the board will hold two meetings in the Queenstown-Central Otago area on April 7 and September 2.
