The speech by John Whitehead, the Secretary of the Treasury, is another example a strategy of the National Party to push controversial ideas out through a series of stalking horses. We saw it with Mark Weldon on SOEs, Whitehead has already done it, and here we go again. This time, however, it is all a bit odd.
John Whitehead is a good public servant. He was a loyal servant of the Labour Government, as he has been of all governments in the 27 years he has been at Treasury. He would simply not do a speech like the one he did yesterday without a clear direction from government. But why John Whitehead, why not Iain Rennie, the State Services Commissioner? Rennie refused to totally endorse Whitehead’s speech in his interview with Kathryn Ryan this morning. Given numerous opportunities to say he supported everything in the speech, he would not do it.
It looks as if SSC and Tony Ryall have largely been left out of what Bill English tells us is a programme for “significant and lasting change to the public service’. Treasury and English are in charge. It certainly is not what John Key said in October last year:
I also want to reassure people – and this is my second point – that a new National Government is not going to radically reorganise the structure of the public sector… Few problems are solved by significant reorganisations- in fact many more tend to be created.
If we look back over the last few weeks, English has really been upping the ante in terms of state sector. He went out of his way to suggest that teachers and nurses should not expect a pay rise when their agreements expire next year. Now we have him hammering the message about cuts and potential privatisation in the public services. But why? Word has it that some Chief Executives are not going fast enough or deep enough for Mr English and he think a further shot needed to be fired across the bows. This will be interesting, because the current State Sector arrangements do put the power in the hands of the CE. Could some of them be on a collision course with the government?
Its not possible to know what John Key says and what John Key means. Rather, we have to look at what he does and what indications can be wrought from those actions.
What we do know is that Key has embedded National Inc. operatives throughout the public service to monitor expenditure and seek out those functions which can be supplied by private sector contractors. This latest speech is the beginning of the implementation process. Hamstrung by his election promise not to privatise, the contracting out “enterprise wide” public service functions like payroll and recruitment is the next best thing.
The softening up has begun.
I am praying that John Key has a secret agenda. Take a look at the numbers: http://www.interest.co.nz/gallery5.asp , taxpayers deserve a break and the state sector needs to be slashed.
Listening to Ian Rennie being interviewed by Kathryn Ryan and checking out his CV I felt that the CEO of State Services should have had some experience in the real world. You know things like chasing bad debts, taking naughty clients to court, filling out GST returns, chasing new work, paying bills, dealing with tenured public officials, stuff like that.
Bryan Spondre
I can only hope National continue relentlessy to make the public service leaner and cost-effective. The attitudes of ’spend this year’s budget to the max because if we don’t we’ll lose it from next year’s budget’ borders on criminal.
If privatisation leads to greater efficiency then let’s do it.
What’s the difference anyway? Right now there are organisations making huge profits from government tenders because they know how the system works.
Government departments release RFP’s that are slanted toward these organisations who can afford teams to prepare their responses. They invariably win the business at bloated prices because the leaner organisations simply can’t afford the man-hours involved in preparing a full response.
Then you end up with a Government Shared Network type of fiasco that results in losses in the magnitude of tens of millions, and it is all footed by the taxpayer.
Err, messed up my blockquotes. The first paragraph isn’t mine, the rest is.
[...] 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 [...]