Luxon to take aim at Hipkins’ govt consultant ‘gravy train’

Christopher Luxon will use his State of the Nation speech today to announce he will hit the brakes on government consultants and the contractor ‘‘gravy train’’ if elected in October, Stuff understands.

Luxon is expected to lay out National’s plan for the year and sharpen his personal critique of Chris Hipkins’ record as a minister in Government.

It is also understood that the National leader will attempt to turn the spotlight on what National views as a Hipkins’ weakness – his performance as public service minister and education minister under Jacinda Ardern.

‘‘Labour has created a gravy train for consultants through its obsession with working groups, ideological pet projects and expensive public sector restructures that are a boon for partners at the big consultancy firms, but are not delivering better results for Kiwis,’’ Luxon is expected to say.

‘‘Under National, this gravy train will stop at the station.’’

It is understood National will promise to reduce both the core and non-core public services spending on consultants, which it calculates cost $1.74 billion in 2021-22.

On National’s numbers, drawn form publicly available annual reports, in the year Labour came to office $1.25b was spent on consultants across the core public sector, and its non-core government agencies, and that has now risen to more than $1.74b.

National’s Simeon Brown has been spending a lot of time building a narrative about big government and the out-of-control level of public servants. The level of core public servants – not contractors – has grown by 28% since 2017.

As a part of the policy, it is understood that National ‘‘will direct public sector agencies to end the culture of relying on contractors at a premium cost to do the regular jobs of public servants, stop enacting the costly and unnecessary restructures and mergers that Labour is obsessed with, and slashing the endless working groups and task forces that are synonymous with this Government’’.

The public sector agencies will also have to report on their use of consultants every quarter under the proposal.

The issues is not a new one; when in opposition in 2012, none other than Labour’s state services spokesperson Hipkins also opined on the issue.

At that stage, over a decade ago, the bill for consultant use had risen from $336 million to $525m and Hipkins claimed that consultants were not bringing expertise but were instead just public servants being paid more.

‘‘They’re actually just the same people doing the same work, but being paid higher rates,’’ Hipkins said.

For the past month National has kept its powder dry and tried to not seem overtly political in the face of natural disasters. But it now appears that attacking Hipkins’ credibility as a minister will be a key part of its strategy.

One of the party’s key messages has been an out-ofcontrol public service, which Hipkins also happened to be in charge of for nearly six years.

Labour has consistently argued that it has simply rebuilt the public service.

The size of the public sector and what it achieves, could well play as some of the mood music for this election year.