Paying the price of cost-cutting
No-one likes officialdom. Over the course of human history, no-one has ever publicly professed their enduring affection for bureaucrats, even though some of us are married to them. That aside, it was still possible last week to feel a twinge of sympathy for the Health Ministry, after a damning report on the country’s drinking water had targeted the ministry’s ‘‘weak to non-existent’’ role in enforcing water safety standards.
Almost simultaneously, the health bureaucrats were hit by an equally damning report on the ministry’s internal culture, the day after its chief executive resigned. To cap things off, new Health Minister David Clark then appointed an independent fivemember committee (to be paid between $518 and $818 per day, each) that will supersede the ministry’s advisory role, until such time as it gets its house in order.
All fair enough. Yet those calamities – and the drinking water crisis in particular – appear to have also been the outcome of failures in political leadership by previous Health Ministers Tony Ryall and Jonathan Coleman, who had inherited a fit-forpurpose set of water safety standards devised in 2007, but then reportedly did next to nothing to ensure they were being met. Surely, the buck stops at the minister’s office. (That’s why they’re paid the big bucks.) It isn’t meant to stop at the door of the ministry’s top official.
Basically, bureaucrats enforce policy (or not) according to their legal obligations, and the political climate of the day. Ever since the public service became politicised in the late 1980s, top officials have been conditioned to jump to the signals emanating from the minister’s office. In fact, their continued employment has rather come to depend upon how sensitive they are to such signals.
Overall, the political culture of the past nine years has been one in which almost any regulatory action that required social spending was viewed with disfavour. Across the public service, cost cutting was pursued as a virtual end in itself. Yes, the Health Ministry may well have provided ‘’’weak leadership’’ – but this was at least partly because the officials in question were receiving strong signals from their political masters to cut corners, in the pursuit of budgetary ‘‘efficiencies’’.
It hardly seems surprising that the new government is finding unmet needs – and related costs – popping up almost everywhere it looks. The known deficits in child poverty, education, affordable housing and mental health services have now been joined by the apparent health risks involved in drinking tapwater. Such have been the costs of deregulation, spread over nine years of largely absentee government. She’ll be right? No, not anymore.
Yes, the water safety crisis will be costly to fix. According to the Havelock North inquiry, some small, impoverished rural areas – spots like Punakaiki – may be putting our entire tourism industry in jeopardy, via the potentially unsafe water being offered to visitors. Such risks in the rural/provincial parts of the country (the inquiry cites the prior contamination of the Darfield water supply) make action imperative.
Arguably, since central government allowed the problem to fester, it should be central government that now does the lion’s share of fixing it.