‘Bloated’ claims a letdown

Suggestions the public service is ballooning are cynical and lazy, says Craig Renney.

In the past few months, seemingly endless attacks have been aimed at the New

Zealand Public Service.

The New Zealand Initiative wrote an article on the public sector, complete with numbers that needed to be later clarified.

Others would have you believe that the public sector is bloated and lacks transparency. Now the National Party is claiming it has ‘‘ballooned massively’’ in recent years.

The trouble is the data doesn’t back up these attacks. Take, for example, the number of public sector workers. The Quarterly Employment Survey of Statistics New Zealand provides regular updates of the number of public and private sector workers.

That data – when adjusted so that it compares the number of full-time equivalent workers – paints a very different picture to the one being painted by National.

Since 2001, the size of the public sector has remained remarkably stable at about 20% of all employment: 20% under John Key, 20% under Bill English, 20% under Jacinda Ardern. The total number of public sector workers has increased, but so has the total number of employees in the economy.

Indeed, when we look at what is sometimes called the core public service, the number of staff has risen by 14,000 since 2017. Over the same time, the number of private sector employees has risen by 100,000. That 14,000 figure also includes the staff hired to deal with the Covid-19 response.

Those numbers don’t tell the full story. The OECD average for the public sector is 18% of all employment. Both the UK and Australia have broadly comparable levels of public sector employment to New Zealand.

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A public sector that is building a record number of state and transitional houses. A public sector that has landed free trade deals with the UK and the EU. A public sector that delivered the winter energy payment and the Best Start payment within 100 days of Labour taking office in 2017.

There is no magic economic indicator which will tell us if we have the right number of public sector workers. But if the complaint is that the public service is not effective enough, the data suggests this is because there are not enough – not too many. The public servant cap under National made for great politics, but terrible public administration. It hollowed out many of the policy teams we needed to tackle our longstanding problems. We are still rebuilding the capacity and capability lost during those years of vandalism. For some, the correct number of public servants is always ‘‘fewer’’. But data we have demonstrates the laziness of their analysis. We can choose to be a country that tackles the problems we face, and strives to build a better, more equal society. That means backing our public sector with the long-term resources to get the job done. Or we can go back to National’s approach of cynically blaming the public service for not tackling issues, whilst not giving them the tools to deliver the task. Hoping all the while that public despair leads to opportunities to outsource for private profit. New Zealand shouldn’t take that path, nor heed the lazy arguments from those unwilling to look at the facts and who simply want to blame those who can’t answer back.

Craig Renney is chief economist at the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions.