Guyon Espiner has blogged on the proposed state sector restructuring. While I don’t agree with everything in his piece it is great that he has taken the time to actually analyse the proposals.
Change should not be confused with progress. Any employee who has gone through a company restructuring exercise knows that. Most workers have a story about the bright spark in management who pulls various parts of a company apart seeking greater efficiencies only for the next boss to take the helm and put them back together again. The result is plenty of upheaval and little gain. I wonder if the latest state sector reforms might end up being a little bit like that.
That is definitely my view of the proposals around Archives New Zealand and National Library. Whatever minimal cost savings might result, the upheaval will outweigh it. Moreover, can anyone in the government actually say that the two organisations are not working efficiently? They have both had top notch audit reports for the last few years. The people who use the services of the Archives are delighted and believe it has never been working better.
This really does feel like National is doing this because they want to be seen to do something in the state sector. Lets be clear, I support finding efficiencies in the public sector. Sometimes that might mean shared services, common procurement, and even structural change. But the approach National is taking is ad-hoc and seems to not take into account what agencies actually do.
Archives and the National Library might not fit into a narrow view of what is important in terms of public services. But they are the guardians of our history, and in Archives case a key part of our transparent and open government. They deserve better than being pushed back into Internal Affairs.
It’s truely frightening that they are tinkering with such an important resource.
Remember the days when there were centralised government computing services, wasnt there too the Government Stores Board for centralised procurement or even Government Print as a one stop shop to save the tax payers money.
After throwing it all out from the mid 80s to the end of the 90s its all back !!
All we need now is for the telephone lines and the railways ( and airline )to be government owned again…. wait a minute.
15 years wasted just going round in circles
If anyone wants to see the result of a “restructuring” for greater efficiency (that is the disguise phrase for slash salaries to inprove the bottom line) look no further than UNITEC Institute of Technology in Auckland.
They “restructured” . made redundant those they identified they didnt need but also lost a huge amount of institutional knowledge and experience because you dont just lose the ones you pick, you unsettle everyone and they look elsewhere.
18 months down the line they are now hiring people into the gaps they created. Like MIT who used the same PriceWaterhouse (model) UNITEC will be back to the same number of staff within 5 years. Go study MIT if you dont believe me.
UNITEC’s bottom line did improve because of slashed salary bills AND the recession which always sees an increas ein student numbers or EFTS ( equivalent fulltime students).
Some people now have the workload of two people because the position made redundant was always needed. These people ware suffering fatigue and low morale. many are actively seeking other work. I am not in a union, I dont work for a union. Not sure why I felt I needed that disclaimer (LOL).
There is a danger of false economy. Within the State Sector, like any there is always dead wood. However, in Unitec’s case they retained a lot of the deadwood. It’s often the way.
The problem with savings from removing salaries from the books is the saving is temporary because the services/product supplied begins to suffer or you actually needed many of those people.
I am not against a review BUT I would like to see reviews based soley on service outcome NOT cost. By this I mean find out, are we delivering a quality product, timely and within our mandate…
As an aside I would love to see a change to the employment laws with regard to redundancy (although my partner recently changed jobs and redundancy was specifically rule out). I would like to see a claim for unjustified dismissal for redundancy being able to be brought within 2 years of a redundancy notice.
Businesses, including Unitec (above) can be “found out” after the event. They run the redundancy argument, use their legal muscle to settle or people have neither the energy or the emotions to fight. BUT within 2 years of a restructure you can clearly see if the redundancy was genuine or if the position really does still exist. It would certainly make employers look more closely and honestly at the reasons for the job loss?
IF someone has found other work quickly, and have made efforts, then the actual damage suffered in a successful case would be minimal.
Great to hear someone standing up for Archives NZ and the National Library. If they become part of bigger organisations (and they both came out of bigger departments), they will find it very hard to get their voices heard in the larger departmental policy and budget processes (let alone around the cabinet table). It was only a decade ago that the National library’s book stock was being sold off because the government of the 1990s didn’t care about our history or heritage.
Hilary. I agree. I would like to know EXACTLY what is failing in the Nat Library and Archives that needs fixing.
Didn’t Key just finish saying about something else that changes wouldn’t be made because the savings are minimal in the scheme of things! This fits when he wants it too.
Tracey: Archives and the National Library are currently working very well together as they share some functions while the National Library building is being renovated. The only problem is lack of accessibility of some National Library materials during this time – but it is short term and not a failure of policy. Archives and the National Library both had comprehensive new Acts in the last few years so they are both positioned to function well into an increasingly digital and information accessible future, while protecting our heritage.
A peculiar streak of philistinism seems to inform a lot of what this government proposes to do. In particular, the policy of seemingly singling out of cultural institutions such as Radio New Zealand, the Archives, etc to save niggardly amounts seems to have the grubby finger prints of the arch philistine himself, Stephen Joyce, all over it. Remember, Mr. Joyce is the man who gave us the cultural wasteland of the talkback Taliban, and it seems he bears a grudge against any sort of cultural institution that might remind people that culture, facts and history actually exist.
Moves like this seem to be part of an ongoing hollowing out of the nation, without any end plan in sight. If you go back to, say the eighties and nineties, it was madness then to think you could destabilise a small isolated society and magically wake up one day as “the Switzerland of the South Pacific” – there are conditions that make Switzerland what it is, and isolation and instability do not number among them. Now that there is no mooted pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, this is just what you do if you are a right wing government; you gut the state sector, with extra fervor for culling the bits that don’t seem “practical” and give unaffordable tax cuts to your friends, because they may, if they feel like it, do something that is of value to the economy as a whole. That these friends are far more likely to look around for safe bets to invest in, like water, power and Auckland, rather than do something creative, does not matter, because after all they are your friends. Meanwhile, there are always PR specialists to dream up new cargo cults if the population gets impatient and they become necessary.
How predictable Labour is – firstly you called this radical reorganising of the public service. It is not radical – it does not go far enough and it is only a small step. After 20 years in business I know that cost efficiencies are rarely anything but small gains constantly. Hell even Labour merged Courts and Justice back into one ministry – are you suggesting it was wrong? or only bad when National do something.
Like any well run business the management should constantly review better ways of doing things. This is yet another example. There may be some minor job loses – but so what – there will also be benefits. It seems to me you believe that there should be no restructuring of Government Departments under National.
Because – well because – oh because its not nice! I have said itr before and I’ll say it again – Labour need to focus on the real issues that are important – not the minor issues like this – it seems you object just for the sake of objecting. It makes you look silly – especially when outside of Molesworth St the rest of NZ think efficiencies are wonderful – especially as every little bit helps.
And as a side note – People like Spud should at least try and get some remote semblence of truth into his posts – it is an utter lie to suggest that any book is going to be sold off. There is no foundation to either of his two pathetic and rather annoying posts. Why do you let him persist balance deleted Trevor
Hilary said that they’ve already done it in the past.
Monty well said…..I also can’t help think of the merging of CYFs into MSD. That merger would no doubt have resulted in a few redundancies and yet no one heard or said boo about it. I am still waiting to see how it has made CYFs more efficient…
In the 1990s whole sections of National Library books and other materials such as journals were considered surplus to requirements and sold off or otherwise disposed of. I know someone who bought a job lot of them. Many other materials were inaccessible because they had never been catalogued and there was no money for this. It was because of a short sighted view of our culture and heritage. In the last 10 years there has been a lot of work on making the collections accessible.
It is all in the historical record. Look up some databases of late 1990s newspaper articles.
Monty – I have no problem with making things “efficient”, but I have yet to read anything (which doesnt mean it does not exist) which shows how Nat Library and Archives are not running efficiently now. Slashing jobs to save money will only save money if those jobs are actually superfluous to outcome.
As for Labour focusing on the small things. If this is such a small thing why does national bother doing it? At some point a number of small things collectively become a big thing, better to object when only a small thing is happening under a larger philosophy than wait til it is larger.
@Monty. No one is saying that the public sector should remain static. It does need to continually adapt and change. And as you note Labour made a number of structural changes while in office. One of those was to separate out Archives. Another was to separate out the Food Safety Authority from MAF. That was within the last ten years. They are both operating efficiently. Why would we not defend that decision?
If anyone is doing something for the sake of it, it is the National Government upending well functioning departments.
@ monty
be assured many of us would far rather have Spud than you!!!
Whether or not you believe it’s a good idea, weren’t there election promises by a certain John Key that the public service would not be restructured?
Sacha
perhaps it was worded for us to take that meaning but for them to be able to show the words could mean something else?
[...] have rehearsed the arguments about this before. Labour actually seperated out Archives and the Food Safety Authority in the last term of [...]