Closing schools is actually an example of the government being efficient. The schools that were closed down were by and large ones where rolls were declining and / or population projections showed the demand wouldn’t be there in the future.

As far as health goes I actually agree with you (as I’ve already suggested earlier). We have massive duplication of buearocracy with all the DHBs that we have while at the same time we are failing to pay skilled doctors, nurses etc well enough to stop them disappearing overseas. That equation has a very simple solution.

That leaves policing where we have all of the problems that you suggest along with one of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world and politicians on both sides engaging in a sordid competition to see who can appear “tough on crime.” Strangely I don’t see either party solving this one any time soon…. But at least the government has banned party pills, good to see they are dealing with the important issues of the day…

“You guys are pathetic, the civil service has grown, Key is ‘comfortable’ with the current levels (note that not unhappy), and there is a suggestion that further down the line the numbers will drop, no actual promises and no indication where and how or what time frame.”

Now I agree that all the dancing around the edges that has been going on, is pathetic. Oh yes, we’ll cap the number of bureaucrats, or perhaps we can conduct a review, perhaps we can raise their productivity…..

BOLLOCKS.

Elephant in room:

# PhilBest +3 Says:
March 13th, 2008 at 7:09 pm

“Look DPF, this is one of the FUNDAMENTAL REASONS that contracting something out to private enterprise will be so much cheaper. Private enterprise, for all the slogans of the Left, does NOT create the sort of feeding trough for overpaid supernumaries that the public sector does. This should NOW be painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain, if it wasn’t before…..”

But a whole thread has gone down and only “Waymad” has got it…….

Think for a moment. What does it do to the public service when the incoming government suddenly lays off the majority of the staff? What happens to the government at that point in time? What happens to the services they were delivering?

A full investigation and a reasonable approach to resolve the problem can only come once you are in government. But not growing something needlessly is a sensible policy.

You however fail to address a simple question. Why is stopping the disproportional growth bad?

You stated crime had gone down but as usual, when pulled up on it try to deflect it with the “whole picture” stuff. Anyone with any common sense knows this is utter nonsense. You are being niaive if you believe that with the police having to spend up to 50% of their time writing speeding tickets, that they will be more effective in combating serious crime. For example, several surveys last year showed that up to 60% of the rural community simply don’t bother phoning the police anymore, there isn’t any point, and so many crimes simply don’t go on the books. This is not the police’s fault. They are having to work under the absurd constraints imposed on them.

So while you are obviously happy to look at the hugely manipulated stats produced while inserting both fingers in your ears saying LA LA LA THERE IS NO INCREASE IN CRIME people with common sense won’t think you are being clever.

Back to the point. 16Bil more a year is now being spent on the state service and I’m darned if I can see how it’s better at all, and categorically not 16Bil a year better.

????!!!! BAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!

Yeah, people give a shit about petty theft and parking infringements going down but dont care about VIOLENT CRIME??!!

MORE PEOPLE ARE GETTING RAPED, BEATEN AND MURDERED!

That is just retarded. You must work in academia.

Also, why no response to Helen Clark on the 500 extra jobs for KiwiSaver – yes there might have been 500 jobs for the implementation, but surely not ongoing – if they are on going, what in hell are they doing? I can’t believe Key didn’t ram those numbers back down her throat – lack of business knowledge, lack of killer instinct?

This whole area is a ripe vein for National to plunder – for example, if you reduce the MOE by 40% how may admin staff / teacher resources does that free up in schools.

- mash the 21 DHBs back into a smaller number, lose the facade of democracy (they’re all micro-managed by MOH anyway) and the accompanying costs, and apply the savings to:
- PPPs for elective surgery. SX has almost 1m members – do they know sumpin’ the Gummint doesn’t? You betcha. Corollary: public hospitals run A&E, research, other care not suitable to provision in the private sector. (Oh, and before we get the socialistas arguing about profit-making, SX is a members’ trust.)
- use the Dutch model of compulsory health insurance, use the tax system/WFF to sort out affordability, and at the same time:
- make health insurance in approved schemes partially or wholly tax-deductible

Do we want this? Yes, we do.
Will it save money? Think, fewer DHB’s, smaller MOH. Yup, it will.
Will it happen? Depends who we vote for, don’t it? Flip a coin..

Sure beats sitting on a wait-right-here-hope-you-don’t-die-first list, hey?

And who hears of strikes, lack of doctors, dirty wards, too few wards, wrong-side operations and all the other daily headlines from the public sector fiasco, in organisations like Southern Cross (SX)?

That same model (a voucher system in all but name) can also be applied to education. After all, who teaches IT staff to run a Windows server or a Cisco router? Or a mechanic to maintain an Audi, Merc, Cat, Volvo or Pug? Not the public sector. These are all wholly private education functions. No Gummint penpushers there. No unit standards. No left-secondary-school-not-able-to-read-or-write’s. Just pure paid-for and earned qualifications, set by the commercial organisations concerned.

Lots of scope, chaps and chapesses, lots of scope.

(mash-up of my posts from the excellent Stuff ‘Gliding on’ blog here)

“disproportionate” growth of civil servants to front line staff, you know this for a fact?

Bogus

“Police – violent crime up 7.5%” Nice statistic in isolation, may other crimes are increasing at much less rates and some are steady or declining, still we’d hate to pick out one random scare mongering statistic.

Pascal they may be applying the breaks, but they aren’t reducing the numbers immediately, so the numbers must be ok, or else this isn’t prudent govt to be holding onto blood sucking staff who don’t produce reports on time with no accountability (apparently).

Duxton, read it again (without the abuseive expletive), he’s happy with the level of the bureaucracy.

Flashman, the level of the NZ bureaucracy isn’t high internationally or proportionately? Flashman you denegration of NZ and the work done here belittles you. We are not some pissat country – tosser.

Back to Double Standard. You can’t stomach the idea that there are people out there independent of Labour and the unions etc that don’t agree with you guys, news flash buddie, there are bloody thousands of us, how else would you account for the entire decade of the 2000s to be led by a Labour Govt.

back to PaulL, so mine are opinions and the rest of the garbage is to be considered what exactly, hardly informed and reasoned debate.

This little side show goes. David posts something, you all jump up “me too me too” and then there is the “we’ll i’m not paying for it”, with a dash of “bloody socialist have ruined this country” and just a tad of “this is how it should be – common sense”.

99% of the arguements here are just opinion, and that is fine, because 99% of the people here don’t have all of the facts and last time I looked (despite what the anti-PC or anti thought police say) it was a free country to express one’s opinion. take southtops little diatribe above, what is that if it isn’t opinion.

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makes the comment thread, well, saner. Out of sight, out of mind. No need to feed invisible trolls. And so democratic!

NCEA….Yea Right!. Students work out how to get the most credits for doing the least work. NZ will pay for this for years. There are no longer winners and losers rather Tui’s and Bellbird’s, Dolphins and Whales, FFS when will you lefties realise that we are in a competitive world and we are not all created equal.

The TEC is close to as big a joke has been ever put together in Wellington, close to NZQA. The TEC do not know how to deliver their own funding policy initiatives. The Poly’s follow the rules and figure out that they are entitled to more funding than the TEC wants them to have so they have to change the rules. Talk about following their masters, stuff up then change the rules to make it ok. try running a business in that environment…oh thats right you dont run businesses just suck off the tit.

No competition between uni’s and poly’s…where the hell do you live? Linwood or Mars? There are approx 10,000 degree level EFTs at the polys and the unis want them. the govt has told the polys to get back to their own regions, no problem with that BUT no such initiative for the unis. The TEC has worked out how many students eash poly should have and if they go 3% above or below they are financially penalised…WTF I thought this govt wanted people to study, if over by 3%+ the poly gets less money. They have SO SO wrong!

Stand at top of Queen St Jafaville and look. Auckland Uni to one side, down the street is the Canterbury, Otago and Vic buildings, out on the shore there is AUT, Waikato and Massey plus all the polys. earth to paul; there are only 4 million people in NZ, how unis does Jafaville need? So TEC has strangled poly funding whilst they continue to pour money down the huge black hole which is the university sector and yet they still compete.

And before the zealot nat supporters get all stiffened up about introducing competition into the marketplace the stories that circulate in the tertiary sector about methods of ‘passing students’ by some private training institutes simply puts any credibility of NZ tertiary education in serious doubt. Whilst this is going on NZQA quietly shifts paper.

So from one who has been in the belly of the beast DO NOT try to tell me that all these extra ‘educational’ bureaucrats are adding value to education. They are adding value to the propoerty prices in Wellington both offices and houses.

As a PS: Cullen has dodged a potentially large bullet here by passing of the Minister of Tertiary Education to Hodgson. The peasants in this sector may revolt. Look for an early election.

When you are traveling to the rugby at 160km/h and you’ve just missed your exit, what do you do?

(a) Put the vehicle in reverse and drive back to your exit
(b) Brake the vehicle to a stop, then put it in reverse and drive back to your exit
(c) None of the above

Paul, your suggestion is that one should put the vehicle into reverse immediately. I can almost guarantee you that you will be destroying large parts of the vehicle in the process and ultimately will not be able to reach your destination.

Unlike you, John Key and the National Party is doing the smart thing. They are applying the brake first.

But I can honestly not understand your “Labour good, National bad” mentality. You are trying to tell us that having the administration grow faster than front-line, useful staff is a good thing. That is quite simply bizarre. I, for one, would rather have more doctors and nurses on the floor. More teachers to reverse this politicised socialist mess of NCEA. The types of people that can actually save the mess Labour have made of our health system, education system and generally of New Zealand.

You on the other hand appear to encourage them. Legendary.

It would not actually be that hard for the SSC to publish core productivity measures on a website that allowed people to comment and debate the effectiveness of such measures. That way over time, you could refine the measures until they truly reflected best practice.

No doubt you would start with the usual meaningless corporate bollocks that ends up in the Annual Report type of measures, but if you were serious about refinement and open to criticism then over time, you would probably end up with some extremely useful and meaningful performance criteria.

Actually, dickhead, read it it again. He has deliberately given himself the ability to keep the numbers the same by reducing the number of policy-wallahs (aka student activitists with worthless sociology degrees, who would otherwise be unemployed/unemployable) and replacing them with frontline staff.

Talking of Slippery, how much did Annette King get as a backhander for appointing Peter Hausmann and Ray Lind as bureaucrats?

Answer: It doesn’t.

Solution: A three phase culling programme.

Phase One: A 70% headcount reduction in six months in the total number [not percentages!] of media and communications officers, strategists, iwi liaison drones, and cycle safety co-ordinators. [There's no justification for winz to have 20 [at last count] “strategic planners” [whatever the feck they are] at their Wellington HQ with a support staff of 60+ [at last count].

Phase Two: The introduction of 1:1.3 hiring policy for all back office staff in the public sector. For every new Farmers suit wearer hired, 1.3 of them are to be made redundant. At the same time there will be no budget provision for the hiring of external consultants.

Phase Three: A progressive roll-out of sweeping departmental and organisational mergers to break the 19th Century public service meme which says that every district and region has to have its own core service provision – some obvious ones include: Auckland region local government, DHB’s, tertiary education [8 universities and 20+ polytechnics for 4 million people is nuts] – the goal is to bring these make work, CEO-heavy fixed-cost monsters into the 21st Century.

Someone flipped that around and asked has the huge growth in the Public sector this decade increased productivity by the same level.

So Paul and others, answer that, has productivity increased or decreased

To hear innocent bystander talk about how the state service was run down and Labour had to build it up again, my response is that with an extra 16000 full timers, and who knows how many contractors we have:

Health – waiting list has more than doubled
Police – violent crime up 7.5% year on year (not mentioning the amount of crime people don’t bother reporting)
Education – schools shut all over the country and over 20% coming out illiterate
Defense force – a laughing stock, no air force, and nearly a bil spent on the LAVs we’ll never be able to use

This is the state service that HC “rebuilt”. I would be quite happy if she put it back to where it was and gave us back the 16bil extra a year they are stealing from us. I think if the waiting list was halved it would be a good start.

What exactly is silly about the statement that the bureaucracy has grown year on year? Is it untrue? Has our population grown that much that we need to grow the government too? Or do you just believe that growth of the government is always good?

You offer no arguments, only platitudes and opinions. You are sneering and condescending in your tone, and clearly think you are better than everyone else. Are you, by any chance, a university student like nome?

Thanks for the link, I couldn’t have thought of a better way to spend the evening trolling through governmental web pages looking for human resources facts and figures. I had my own research to do thanks though, I’m sure it’s riveting.

Besides which, Key is ‘comfortable’ with the current levels, what the hell is the issue? Your golden boy is OK with the level of the civil service, end of story, or is it you aren’t happy with the golden one’s analysis, after all you folk don’t want to pay for anything you don’t like – how’s Brian Connell’s pay packet coming along?