A public business, not a service
Yet again, the neoliberal wrecking ball is swinging through the public service, fronted, alas, by Chris Hipkins, whose laudable attempt (launched last February) to clean up the mess created by the State Sector Act 1988 has been captured by the highpaid top brass of the 1988-model state sector.
The result, released as a ‘‘consultation document’’, boils down to a recipe for making matters worse. Stripped of the glossy photos and spin-doctored rhetoric, the big central idea is to mount yet another attack on the venerable model of a stable career public service, organised into departments of state which took ownership of vital areas of policy and service to the public, and reported yearly on their stewardship of that role to people in plain-English narratives.
That model, which served New Zealand well for seven decades between the 1912 Public Service Act and the 1988 act, embodied all the ideals that have been degraded to mere PR slogans in the consultation document.
The old-model public service was, and was seen as, owned by the public of New Zealand. It provided free and frank advice without fear or favour to governments of whatever political stripe. Its managers took seriously their stewardship of the public estate and of the taonga of a politically neutral, professionally skilled body of vocationally motivated public servants who worked for modest financial remuneration in return for the job satisfaction of serving the public good.
The 1988 State Sector Act, part of the Rogernomics package, drove a stake through the heart of that model. It converted the state sector into a business, run by CEOs on bloated salaries running tightly hierarchical business units, working to financial targets and corporate-style ‘‘key performance indicators’’.
The public, no longer treated as citizens and owners, were reduced to the status of ‘‘clients’’ and ‘‘customers’’. Annual reports became a swamp of managerial gobbledegook, stripped of the plain narratives of the past and filled with arcane metrics.
Forced to compete for resources under the neoliberal project of shrinking government, departments morphed into secretive silos that withheld information and co-operation under the justifiable fear of being asset-stripped by the more powerful or well-funded.
Asset-stripping was indeed the fate of any unit within the state sector that lacked protection – witness our national library and national museum – as the core value of stewardship has been trashed under the 1988 act’s ‘‘new public management’’.
Recall also the elimination of the Ministry of Works and DSIR – two of the great departments whose proud record ran afoul of a neoliberal Treasury’s determination to dominate the public sector: At a stroke of the executive pen, New Zealand was condemned to three decades of infrastructure deficits and nearly the weakest R&D effort in the Western World.
A clear-eyed independent evaluation of the 1988 disaster would acknowledge it for what it was, and seek to recover as much as possible of the superior previous model. Instead, evaluation has been tightly constrained and held closely to the State Service Commission’s chest (you can find the entire saga at http://www.ssc.govt.nz/ proactive-releases), while calls for a royal commission have been fought off tooth and claw.
Apparently unable to jettison an act that was Labour policy in its day, the new Labour-led Government talks up 1988 as a ‘‘success’’ and proposes to use it as the starting-point for a new legislative tsunami.
The essence of the new ‘‘Big Idea’’ is on page 3 of the ‘‘short form’’ consultation document: ‘‘What if we could rearrange our public services like building blocks? Imagine how quickly and easily we could shift our people and resources to cope with changing times and needs.’’
Imagine indeed if all public servants were reduced to the generic one-size-fits-all ‘‘management’’ model. Imagine if police staff could be shifted to writing the Budget; imagine if hard-pressed social workers could be shifted to approving mineral exploration permits; imagine if teachers could be shifted into hospitals to make up for a shortage of doctors. This is nonsense – MBIE writ large.
This looks like a campaign to overwhelm the remaining vestiges of professionalism and specialised departmental ownership of policy areas; to open the way for yet more assetstripping of the public estate; and to push the public service further into the corporate abyss.
Basically it’s a power grab at the top of the system, reducing public servants to pawns to be shifted around the policy chessboard at the whim of all-powerful central planners.
The core principles to be codified are listed in bloodless corporate-speak on page 12 of the ‘‘long-form’’ consultation document. They conspicuously omit basics such as stewardship of the public estate, responsiveness to citizens, provision of information in a form that enables citizens to perform their vital function as citizens, rigorous adherence to the principles of the Official Information Act, and providing services to citizens (revealingly, the ‘‘principles’’ instead talk of ‘‘purchasing and providing services for citizens’’ – the corporate-client model of 1988).
This is not a good, nor a sensible, place to start a massive overhaul of the public service. Public trust in the state sector is pretty low, and the ‘‘consultation’’ process and documentation vividly illustrate why. We need a royal commission, and we need it now.