Are you being served?
The debate on the size of the public service is always fun to watch. Labour has been digging for information on planned cuts to the public service and has some cabinet papers that show National is planning to cut 470 jobs by the end of 2011 (Labour managed to read this as 460 jobs by the end of the year). Grant Robertson, Labour’s state services spokesperson, depicts this as wanton, indiscriminate slashing that will lead to “poorer services for the public”.
My initial reaction is two-fold:
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The real debate should be on how services are provided and what services are provided not how many provide them
”Labour, of course, show that they are inherently incapable of reducing the public service. I challenge them to demonstrate that the public service will be less “efficient” without these 470 people. Tim Watkin at Pundit demonstrates that the public service has remained at around 1.6% of the workforce since 1999. He thinks this means that the Public service is “anorexic”! I find this an extraordinary statement. In the 1970s the massive bureaucracy sat at 4.6% of the workforce and this dwindled to 1.6% by 1999. It has then sat at that level for a decade. Is Tim really suggesting that there have been no efficiency gains over the past 10 years? And can he not see that the excessive complexity of state interventions has hampered development of more efficient ways of doing things? Just the expansion of the internet alone has rendered large portions of the public service interface with the public generally redundant.
This obsession with the size of the public service is irrelevant. The real debate should be on how services are provided and what services are provided not how many provide them. National has attempted to address that with it’s “line by line” review, although letting public servants do these reviews is a little like letting the drug addicts count the morphine amps during the stock take.
The only way we are going to reduce the size of the civil service is to reduce the size of government in general and that is going to take more than just firing a few public servants. Nothing less than a major restructuring of the welfare state will produce anything more than cosmetic changes to the size and shape of the public service.
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May 1 10 12:40 pm
Mac, you appear to have missed the sleight of hand by the Pundit..
Note that he gives figures for 1970-79, then jumps 20 years to 1999-2009.. can you recall what happened during those missing years?
Yep, the Labour Govt of 1984-90 restructured and corporatrised a huge chunk of the PS. From a peak of 89,000 in 1986 the PS fell to 58,000 in 1988 and the numbers continued to fall to about 30,000 in 99-00 under National. What happened was the “trading” depts were mostly got rid of and remaining depts had their workers changed from “core” public servants to employees and contractors.
Thus the glory years for the PS were built up around non core workers in trading depts and depts that (eg) ran their own workshops, house painters and tea ladies.
What Labour has done over the past decade was add back a further 30% of bodies, but nearly doubled the Core Crown Expenditure, so we have the double whammy of more bodies and more expenditure.. there mightn’t be a tea lady anymore, but there’s a flash new tea room with a $10,000 coffee machine in the corner.
JC
May 1 10 2:33 pm
I didn’t miss it, it simply wasn’t germane to my post. However, your point about the corporatisation of the public service is well made.
May 2 10 12:33 pm
This obsession with the size of the public service is irrelevant
Crap. 37,379 is far too many! 3,373 is probably too many – and none of these are counting the doctors, teachers, social workers and all the rest that live on the government tit.
If NZ stopped all welfare spending, we couldn’t even get a tax cut: we’d just stop borrowing.
Emergency budgets – like Cameron’s plan for the UK – have been needed as soon as Key took over, and still haven’t happened! NZ needs not just to cut, but to gut the whole state sector- not just the core public sevice.
Firing 460 or 470 wellington bludgers is just a very very slow start.