Editorial: Reins still loose on public sector

OPINION: The public service is a dollar-devouring behemoth that has thwarted many attempts to rein it in.

Prime Minister John Key will need to do better than he has so far, if he is going to succeed in slipping on the halter. It is vital that he does.

There were, Mr Key said in 2008, "some excesses built up in the Government" and it was time to move spending to frontline services. There was talk of razor gangs to cut waste in a sector in which the number of core public servants had increased 44 per cent between 2000 and 2007.

Last year, there was a blunt warning from Treasury Secretary John Whitehead for state servants to improve their performance. "Nothing should be off the table: for example, contracting out delivery as we do with some social services and others, like Australia, do with private prisons, may be more effective," he said.

Now the Government is treading so carefully it risks making no progress. Mr Key, through a spokeswoman, has denied there is any proposal that might be described as "radical reform". Instead, all indications are of a process that smacks of the ad hoc, and of being driven by fear of public reaction as much as by any coherent strategy.

That is not good enough. Despite improvements in government finances, the Treasury is still forecasting deficits will continue to 2016. Finance Minister Bill English rightly wants the focus to remain on getting out of deficit as quickly as possible.

Tackling public sector reform is central to that, but the Government is showing little appetite for hard decisions. Certainly those in the private sector would be surprised if a cost-saving measure was passed over because it did not carve enough off.

Yet that is what appears to have happened when it comes to smaller ministries and organisations that could have been folded into other departments, or wound up.

The Women's Affairs Ministry, for example, could have been incorporated into the Labour Department or the Social Development Ministry. Mr Key has all but ruled that out on the grounds that "it costs very little, and doesn't involve very many people".

A more plausible explanation is that Mr Key and his colleagues do not have the stomach for that fight, for doing the same with the Pacific Island Affairs Ministry, or for getting rid of UnitedFuture's Families Commission, however irrelevant it might be.

Instead, Mr Key says the Government wants to make big gains.

The onus is now on him to show he can deliver, without compromising public services. Certainly with 41 departments and ministries, 84 statutory Crown entities, 11 Crown entity companies, 17 state-owned enterprises, 31 tertiary institutions and numerous other bodies, such as the Lottery Grants Board, there are considerable gains to be made from minimising the inevitable costs of fragmentation.

There is need for care in the area – the independent role of Archives New Zealand has to be protected, for example, – but there is an even more pressing need for progress.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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Miles Lacey   #2   11:53 am Mar 12 2010

If you want to trim public spending here's an idea: fire all the public relations experts, cost cutting razor gangs, consultants and analysts who are basically useless parasites that contribute nothing but who seem to be untouchable because the pompous swine in Parliament and elsewhere are too proud to admit that not one of them can actually understand the gibberish that these parasites churn out day after day.

Kararaina   #1   10:22 am Mar 11 2010

Some are still waiting for tax cuts to be funded by reducing government spending. National is spending more as a percentage of GDP that even Labour did in their 9 years? Labour continues to argue for higher levels of government bureaucratic spending, full-blown central-planning and micro-managing the lives of NZers by state - but what gets me is that somehow Nats appear to be far too busy responding to those Labour-led agenda (like imposing ETS tax, or dumbing-down student investors in tertiary education rather than measuing return on student investments; while excessively self-indulgent health ministry spending - also referred to as programming, or contracting, or committee spending to to escalate, at least through to July [?]... on bods, boards, and a myriad of so-called ethics committees. In tertiary education, Measuring paying student investment by a provider's own measure of academic performance alone is inconsistent with international best practice - where, quality is measured by return on student investment (AUT, Australia etc)given that it is the student who is paying not the providers. Much more useful is recent thinking around mining small sections of National Parks; or, better choices in education. Still, Government continues to steal 40% of income through a multitude of ever-increasing taxes that are forcing up prices of all goods (petrol, electricity). So, long as NZ's public sector remains stranded in "middle-ground" those who are worse-off will continue to be made alot worse-off - either drowning in Brain Drain tertiary institutions or else escaping to other countries.

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