In Parliament we have to put up with day in and day out Bill English simply making things up about Labour’s record in government. To give him credit his devotion to the messages created by Crosby Textor is something to behold. David Parker did a great response to his rubbish recently.
Today in Question Time we had the usual nonsense about “out of control” growth in public spending. I tabled the graph above that appears in the Institute of Policy Studies publication The Future State, and is from State Services Commission data that shows all elements of the wider state sector decling or remaining steady as a percentage of the total labour force, including the core public sector.
Mr English said I could “use any figures I like” to defend my position. No, not any figures I like, the ones from the State Services Commisssion- the government’s advisor on State Services.
I constantly wonder why the media will not simply double check the National party’s ‘crazy public sector’ message against facts. The facts are there, available as you have them from the State Services Commission, or for free off the Statistics New Zealand website.
Hopefully, some of them may browse your posting.
MSM rule No 1. Don’t rock the boat.
Its hard without the exact numbers – but what this doesn’t show is the correlation against the population growth.
If it remained as a static %age of 20% between 1997 and 2008 that would equal almost 100,000 people being employed !
And that is a HUGE amount – and would indeed show a “out of control” growth in public spending.
I noticed that question time was completed in under an hour each day this week. Is this a record? Thought the Speaker did a good job each day – firm and even handed.
Grant: okay, so these figures posted on Kiwiblog (taken I think from one of John Key’s speeches) are wrong then?
*Labour has had education bureaucrats grow in number by 40% compared to 12% growth of teacher numbers
*Central Health bureaucrats up 51% while medical professionals up 28%
*MSD policy staff have increased 109% while MSD service staff only 23%
*Overall an increase in bureaucrats by 37%, and 1 in 50 employees in NZ is now a bureaucrat
*Salary costs for policy departments have increased 142%
*Government Administration has been the fastest growing sector of the economy
That said, even if the number of staff in the back rooms of the public service hasn’t increased disproportionately, there is certainly no dispute about the level of pay increases they got under Labour – a 600% increase in those earning more than $300k is enough to make anyone’s eyes water!
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/politics/2968420/Big-pay-rises-for-top-bureaucrats
National is gutting the public sector!
John Armstrong also points out that there are 210 CEOs, 210 payroll systems, 210 IT systems, 210 HR systems…seems a lot for such a teeny tiny country.
I’m sure that they have their purposes.
Since the argument is about the % of GDP that is government spending and this graph doesn’t show salary increases…
Jeremy M Harris – my thoughts exactly hence the article I posted above. I found those figures disturbing to say the least, especially at a time when householders were really struggling.
I don’t Grant is wrong or that public servants weren’t underpaid in 2000…
I just don’t think either side is having a full, frank debate…
I think Grant is slightly wrong in the sense that I believe Labour perhaps compensated to the extreme in terms of increasing public service numbers (which were of course gravely depleted under the previous Nat government) and increasing their salaries.
But yes, both sides tend to grossly exaggerated and the loser is always the truth.
I wouldn’t say to the extreme just repairing the damage.
In terms of the pay of rank and file public servants under Labour, that increased at about the same rate as pay in the private sector. The only areas where it grew faster was for teachers, nurses and doctors which I think most of us would support.
I agree with you the salaries of CEs did get out of hand, and you will remember that Phil addressed this issue in his speech at the start of the year.
There is also definitely room for efficiencies in terms of payroll, HR etc. The ethos of the 80s/90s was to set up departments/Ministries as effectively competing business units. It has caused significant duplication that I think should be improved. But be aware that one size fits all also will not deliver us the best public services we can get.
In any event the point I am trying to make in this post (and the SSC figures show) is that yes the public service did grow in real numbers (after a significant drop in the 90s) but it was not the grossly disproportionate growth National make it out to be.
Grant I must have missed that in Phil’s speech at the beginning of the year – I heard him acknowledge other things though which I found encouraging.
Good to know the Labour party does in fact recognise how excessive these pay rises and consequently, public spending got.
Yes I agree that when the Nats point out the number of people working in the “bloated public service” they fail to recognise where those numbers started from and what in many ways, was a natural growth in terms of getting it back up to speed and general population vs employment increases.
I thought a good point is that we have low taxes, low productivity and yet we ran surpluses for the noughties… Can’t have been too bad…
@ Chris
I agree the graph is difficult to interpret in its current form. I don’t see why it measures state sector jobs as a portion of total employment, surely absolute numbers or as a percentage of total population would be more useful.
Competition is more expensive than a monopoly simply because it does create duplication. Depending upon the industry it can do worse than that as well. Telecommunications is a good example of where competition is massive cost inflater. Added networks and added bureaucracy to manage the interconnect agreements. It’s not really surprising that the telcos are starting to talk about having a single network that they all operate over – what is surprising is that it took them so long (and, of course, the government should have been aware of those added costs before they sold Telecom).
This isn’t to say that competition is bad but that we need to really consider if competition in any given industry is the best option for the community.
Draco, I must commend you on your persistence for explaining this point.
Competition is not the only driver to excel operationally and strategically and shouldn’t be talked about as if it is always the best solution; sometimes co-operation also brings benefits for all concerned.
(And sometimes it doesn’t – it depends on the quality and level of leadership in all cases).
Mr key’s own office has grown under National, as has Joyce’s. I guess it would be churlish to expect them to point that out.
Exactly what public service do the Pm’s growing staff carry out, compared, say, to the head of the Ministry of Health?
Grant, so your response to the ‘crosby textor’ line that has embedded in the public mind the fiction that bureaucrat numbers skyrocketed under Labour is to blog and table a graph in Parliament? No wonder they are 20 points up in the polls.
I agree with jennifer that NACT has been allowed to control too much of the languaging and concepts now used in common public discussion. Whoever does their PR is very good.
Labour has not yet got its act together (pardon the pun) in generating an alternative view of the current and future state of NZ.
Many of the ingredients are there, but the cake is not rising yet.
Frustrating.
A friend of mine who is an immigration consultant told me that, when Labour came to power, Immigration New Zealand employed 900 people. When it left government, the same department, servicing pretty much the some number of immigrants no faster, employed 2,400. Is this true?
I think the outgoing head of Treasury put it on Q and A on Sunday that their target for government is 20% of GDP. Their goal means less workers, less tax funded services – because they have no real target for meeting this target by increasing wages/taxable income.
While they support a CGT, they see this as a means for a budget nuetral tax reform (lower other income taxation), rather than as a means to sustain existing public service delivery and provision (health care for the old and super are clearly being ring fenced for health insurance etc).
Bleepin disgraceful