Bill Ralston has had a couple of goes at the public service in his recent blogs. In particular he has come out swinging in support of Treasury Secretary John Whitehead’s speech on Monday. I will write a full response to Bill’s comments in next few days, but I just wanted to note that there is a bit of a contrast in analysis between Bill and John Armstrong in today’s Herald.
Bill was pretty critical of my statement that the speech was a precursor for privatisation and deeper cuts to the public service. Today Armstrong says
Whitehead’s sugar-coated prosletyzing for what is clearly intended to be holus-bolus privatising of services delivered by state agencies went way beyond a chief executive’s brief.
and
Clearly, however, both the Treasury and English – who this week revealingly said he wanted the reforms in the state sector to “stick” so that no future government can unravel them – are using the recession as cover to reduce the role of the state and strip back the public service to some kind of skeletal level that will make it difficult to rebuild.
He also picks up the theme of my stalking horses post the other day, with a slightly different take, but certainly emphasising that this was an unusual speech for the Treasury Secretary to make. Hopefully get my full response to Bill up tomorrow.
It’s the classic Roger Douglas approach – never waste a good crisis. It was only a matter of time before the Nats started to use the economic downturn as an excuse to make cuts and sell stuff off despite their pre-election promises not to do so.
These cuts are to the public service that grew by 44% between 2000 and 2007 ???????
Just to save Trevor the bother………….
Comment deleted due to abuse or off topic or whatever.
@johnbt: agreed.
Really can’t see the problem if Bill English & John Whitehead are signaling cuts back to the size of the core public service. During the last 10 years the core public service has sucked some of our best and brightest out of the tradeables sector into the non-tradeables sector inflating labour costs and reducing the resources available to the productive export sector.
“reducing the resources available to the productive export sector.”
Nah mate, it was the high dollar that mattered most to me.
But then, you aren’t self employed are you?
@Brian are you referring to Those that chose to stay in the country and work for their nation, as opposed to those that chose to leave this country in the search for a liveable wage?
High Pay=Happy Worker=High Productivity. Simple
I agree with Chris Hipkins comments.
Seems like a dam good opportunity for National to show their true cards (and feelings) on the public sector and privitisation.