Value not bloat

John Armstrong had a good article in Saturday’s Herald. He pointed out that National, in the face of the economic crisis, was moving to initiate what Armstrong sees as the biggest shake-up of the core public service since the 1980s.

Guy Body - NZ Herald 28 February

The latest upheaval will be less visible than National’s previous attempts to pare back the State – deliberately so in order to blunt attacks from Labour and the public sector unions.

It is less driven by ideology and more by John Key’s view that public services are always comparatively high-cost operations and therefore should not be immune from being made to re-invent themselves as selling smarter, better services.

This is possibly the critical difference. Key is focused on delivering value for money. Something which was lost over the last 9 years. In Adam’s view there is much that could be done to improve service delivery and enhance the front end., whilst at the same time cutting out waste. Adam would not be the only one seeing NZ as having a bloated bureaucracy with excessive red-tape.

As an aside Body’s cartoon was seen by Adam as apposite.

Armstrong then discusses a number of aspects, including how some state sector CEOs saw the writing on the wall much earlier than colleagues and moved accordingly.

Armstrong concludes:-

All the time, English is tightening the fiscal clamp on departments as his revenue projections worsen.

His message to chief executives this week was particularly blunt. Their budgets faced permanent restraint, yet he expected them to provide more and better services with the same number or fewer people and the same or less funding.

National suspects that after a decade of plenty when the number of core public servants jumped from 29,000 to nearly 44,000, there is plenty of slack in the system. It knows that it will be obliged to give some backing to chief executives when things get sticky politically for them.

But if there was ever a time to apply the blowtorch to the bureaucracy it is now. With widespread job losses anticipated in the private sector, not much notice is going to be taken of squealing by the public sector.

Armstrong hits the nail on the head. There will be little sympathy for what many regard as a cosseted public sector and bloated bureaucracy, when jobs are being lost in the parts of the economy that actually pay for the state. Expect recriminations as well when the public starts to realise just how spendthrift the ancien regime was. Perhaps the economic crisis will force people to face some realities about just what the state can actually achieve. Additionally it is high time that the state should be subject to value for money assessment, in many areas.

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