Expert opinion from Victoria University Wellington - Te Herenga Waka
Opinion: Did we really have too many public servants loitering in the back office?
The Government will have felt justified in trimming back the numbers, especially those whose evidence it no longer wished to consider or whose findings it no longer wished to hear.
It may have even led to a more transparent use of public money had the touted savings not been loaded into a beer funnel and poured down the throats of our property investment oligarchy.
When outsourced to the for-profit consultancy machine, much of the corporatised outputs and doctored reporting was probably of negligible benefit anyway.
The problems had their genesis in the New Public Management reforms of the late 1980s.
Contractualism (procuring services, usually from the private sector) and managerialism (strategic managers in place of subject-matter experts) were championed for their supposed efficiencies.
These organisational theories from the business world have pervaded our bureaucratic operations and progressively changed the way it operates.
Despite a rapidly growing population, the Key-led government also capped the number of public servants.
Taken together, by the time Labour had won back government in 2017, much of the analytical capability along the Terrace had moved to the private sector.
When the public servant cap was finally removed, a lot of the new capability was made up of graduate-level hires or an overflow of academically qualified tertiary sector employees (often tasked with overseeing the work of consultants).
Not institutionalised in public sector norms, these new hires were dropped into an operating environment with steep hierarchies and complicated signout procedures – each a by-product of managerialism.
A deputy chief executive vested with the power to approve work and update ministers might be four or more layers of management away from the public servant leading the project.
Managing directors at the larger consultancies could reach the same senior bureaucrats on a whim.
As ministers in the Ardern government sought to expand the role of the welfare state they were increasingly reliant on senior bureaucrats informed by these networks of privatised advice.
What could possibly go wrong?
One needn’t be a francophone philosopher with a pack-a-day habit to understand some of the inherent conflicts.
If, for example, an evaluation of activities undertaken by a ministry suggested things were working well, pressure would quickly follow to publicise the findings. When it did not, ministries would ruminate over how to best mitigate such findings before any ministerial briefing.
It is at this juncture the great pantomime would unfurl.
If an evaluation was conducted externally, by a (supposedly independent) consultant, they might be further remunerated to go back and ‘re-evaluate’ their work.
When senior bureaucrats can veto adverse research findings, and discuss their desired outcomes with consultants over an almond croissant, it transforms the role of their subordinates into that of mere contract managers.
By this same logic, evaluations completed internally could also trigger dissenting opinions from different parts of the business, making them susceptible to ‘review’.
Through no fault of their own, much of the new analytical expertise has been subsumed into the public relations objectives of respective ministries.
To a bewildered public, Nicola Willis looks more like Jesus clearing the grifters out of Herod’s temple than Ruth Richardson eviscerating core public spending.
Before returning to government, Labour will need to work out how to avoid another rort and how it might confront misconceptions about what people on the Terrace do.
On the latter point, it will need to articulate the intent behind having such talent on board in the first place. A difficulty exacerbated by its own failure to forge ahead with the transformational change it had campaigned on.
An equally difficult task to that of articulation will be to unwind the contractualism and managerialism that has plagued the public sector’s ability to effect meaningful change.
In addressing this, there are two ideas I think merit further consideration.
The first is where public sector capability is built back.
A need will return for greater analytical expertise. It might be sensible for some of this hiring to take place in parts of the bureaucracy that are at an arm’s length from the spin machine of respective ministries.
Rather than ministries evaluating their own activities (or consultants evaluating ministries), the remit of agencies such as the Office of the Auditor-General could be widened to accommodate the roles and responsibilities of such personnel.
The second is how additional capability requirements are procured. The private sector will continue to play an important role; there is, for example, only so many econometricians in New Zealand or people with the know-how to engage with iwi on issues related to their respective communities.
The current procurement approach tends to be open tender. A universities-first approach might encourage each of the eight research-aligned institutions to draw from their own resources and bid on work in a semi-competitive environment (incorporating private sector capability into their bids where it is needed).
Only when there are no suitable bidders would the tender go out to a wider pool of potential suppliers.
Each idea would take some working through to get right, but a greater challenge will likely come from the naysayers with vested interests.
Whatever the plan, ingrained issues will require novel solutions.
Those made redundant in recent months should be reassured that the blame rests solely with successive governments who have failed to tackle the structural issues in our bureaucracy.
We didn’t have too many public servants, we just weren’t using the many skills they had to offer.
Two areas much unappreciated in the managerial culture now pervasive in the public sector are record keeping and institutional knowledge.
A good measure of how the decline of capability has been obscured, is the ratio of communication staff to scientists and other professionals. Leaders without experience or expertise in the core capabilities of their sector are not going to turn this around. Who heads the public service commission will be one indication of this being likely. It is clear that this decline has occurred whatever party is in government, triggered by the elevation of political advisors, and the rise of the policy analyst as a jack-of-all-trades (and master of none). The size of the sector is a side issue.
he root cause of the hire/fire cycles in the public service (and the boom/bust in other sectors of our economy) is the party system of democracy compounded by election cycles and the disproportionate impact of minority views. I think these are solvable problems and suggest the following remedies be considered:
1.) Ban funded political parties and require all elected politicians to swear an oath that they will represent the majority wishes of their particular electorate as best they can determine them.
2.) Implement rolling elections. While individual electorates could continue holding elections at 3-yearly intervals, electorates throughout the country would have their elections staggered over a 3-yearly cycle. As an example rotation, New Zealand could be divided into 108 electorates, with just 3 electorates holding an election per month. At the end of their particular 36 month cycle, the first 3 electorates would hold their next election. Potentially, 1/36th of Parliament could be refreshed monthly and the present 3 yearly cycle of country-wide hype and promises would be avoided. The possibility of replacing incumbent politicians at the rate of 3 per month should prevent parliamentary power cliques forming.
3.) Require votes in parliament to have at least an 80%* majority to pass. Otherwise, the status quo would prevail. The majority view would prevail, not the minority. (* 80% might be too high, but definitely a lot more than 51%.)
With a more stable form of democracy, the public sector could quietly get on with the job of building its skill levels.
Managerialism is also reflected in salary distributions. Because managers determine salaries, managerial skills (and yes they do exist even if sometimes absent from the incumbents!) to be more highly valued because those skills are what managers best understand. And the ratio of top salaries to bottom salaries thus achieved within the organisation exacerbates the wealth disparities in our society, all post-1980s. Inabilities for many to afford good housing, good food, medical services, and even education (when kids have to go out to work) all follow.
Other causes of civil service growth are the increasing size and complexing of departmental operations and with that increased compliance to rules dreamed up by other departments.
No big business survives without a plan and the public service can have no plans when pandering to the whims of politicians only interested in tactics and staying in power.
We’ll be no better off until the country has some overall long term plan that we (the people) can hold politicians accountable for achieving at every election. Politicians are incapable of producing long term plans so we need another body to do this. I recall NZ had such an institution at some time past.