Comments on: Stalking horses

By: Armstrong v Ralston « Red Alert

Armstrong v Ralston « Red Alert — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:53:11 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Ari

Ari — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:51:19 +0000

Err, messed up my blockquotes. The first paragraph isn’t mine, the rest is.

By: Ari

Ari — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:50:43 +0000

He would simply not do a speech like the one he did yesterday without a clear direction from government.

John is a family member of mine, and I can confirm that his speech was his own. It wasn’t even a controversial speech to be honest, just saying that the public sector still has room for improvement and that now is a really good time for them to up their game.

Sorry to disappoint.

By: LabRat

LabRat — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:15:21 +0000

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.

By: Elvis Christ

Elvis Christ — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:58:42 +0000

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

By: BLiP

BLiP — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:19:44 +0000

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.