Armstrong on public sector restructuring
February 28th, 2009 at 10:37 am by David FarrarJohn Armstrong looks at what National is doing:
You won’t hear National saying as much. But the minority Government has quietly begun what in the end might be the biggest shake-up of the core public service since the 1980s.
It has taken a while for this to sink in to those in Wellington.
The latest upheaval will be less visible than National’s previous attempts to pare back the State – deliberately so in order to blunt attacks from Labour and the public sector unions.
It is less driven by ideology and more by John Key’s view that public services are always comparatively high-cost operations and therefore should not be immune from being made to re-invent themselves as selling smarter, better services.
Indeed, the Government should not be immune from the same restraint the rest of the country is.
Related posts:
- A smaller public sector
- The future public sector
- Keeping public sector costs down
- 20% higher pay in the public sector
February 28th, 2009 at 10:49 am
http://www.nzcpr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=514&p=19732#p19732
NZ’s FIrst and foremost VRWC Blog
The Ideal Hostess for an Ideological Boston Tea Party
By Robert Tracinski
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com
Last week, in his now-famous rallying cry against the Obama administration’s march toward socialism, CNBC financial commentator Rick Santelli called for a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest against the rapid expansion of government.
The idea of a Boston Tea Party-inspired tax protest had already been percolating, if you will, and when Santelli gave voice to it, it emerged as a new movement. A group that calls this the “New American Tea Party” has set up a website to coordinate protests across the nation this Friday, including in Washington, DC. These protests are just the beginning, especially if the current government interventions in the economy continue to make things worse, which I fully expect them to do.
But we will need more than just a political rebellion against the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. We will need to engage in an ideological struggle, a battle of ideas. Columnist Monica Crowley named it best early last week when she called for a “21st century Boston Tea Party” and said that we needed a “second American revolution of ideas,” “of getting back to the ideals of limited government, of constitutional parameters on government power, of individual liberty, and of the free market.”
Yet we have to ask: where is the intellectual ammunition for this battle of ideas going to come from? It is important to remember that a Republican administration started us down this plunge into socialism. In praising Rick Santelli, Roger Kimball asks a very good question: “do we really need to go back to economic kindergarten and relearn” the lessons of the failure of statism and the superiority of capitalism? The answer is that we have to go back to basics because we never quite learned the fullest, deepest, philosophical reasons for the moral and practical superiority of capitalism.
Fortunately, we know where to find the free-market ideas we need, and this source is already indirectly driving the new taxpayer revolt. It’s time to bring it fully out into the open.
In defending his stance against the bailouts, Rick Santelli referred to himself as an “Ayn Rander” — a reference to the great 20th-century novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, who is most famous for her ideological defense of laissez-faire capitalism.
Similar references seem to be lurking behind nearly every expression of resistance to big government. Rush Limbaugh — whose coining of the term “porkulus” helped galvanize the right’s resistance to the so-called “stimulus” bill — has frequently recommended Ayn Rand’s magnum opus Atlas Shrugged in recent months, as has conservative talk show host Glenn Beck.
In January, Stephen Moore caused a stir by arguing, in the Wall Street Journal, that the current crisis is turning Atlas Shrugged “from fiction to fact.” And those who are warning that increased government restrictions will cause the nation’s most productive workers to withdraw their talents have taken to calling this the “John Galt Effect,” a reference to the hero — and the main plotline — of Atlas Shrugged.
It is no coincidence that the strongest resistance to a government takeover of the economy is coming from people influenced by Ayn Rand. She has long functioned as a stiffener of resolve and as the fountainhead of pro-free-market ideas.
I have written about this at greater length, but Ayn Rand’s contribution to the philosophical defense of capitalism can be summed up in one central idea: individualism. Ayn Rand demonstrated that the ultimate source of all wealth — everything from steel mills to microchips — is the individual reasoning mind. Thus, a society that wants to prosper has to ask what is required by its thinkers and producers, the “prime movers” who originate and implement new ideas. And the first thing that is required for these thinkers to function is that they be free from coercive interference by bureaucrats, by blowhard legislators, or by federal “czars.”
Ayn Rand was an individualist in the fullest sense: she regarded the unfettered individual, not just as a source of wealth, but also as an end in himself with the right to profit from and enjoy the wealth he creates, without being forced to sacrifice his happiness for the allegedly greater good of the collective. The issue, as she once put it, is not whether or not you give a dime to a beggar. The issue is whether you have a right to exist if you don’t — and whether you have to buy your life, one dime at a time, from every moocher who comes along asking for a handout. She gave the clearest and most consistent “no” to that standard of morality, and the clearest and most consistent “yes” to the moral rights of the creators and producers.
There has been some recent crowing about how the current financial crisis has discredited Ayn Rand’s defense of self-interest and the free market, as demonstrated by the defection of Alan Greenspan. In reality, the current financial crisis does not demonstrate the failure of Greenspan’s alleged pro-free-market ideas, which he actually rejected decades ago; rather, it demonstrates the failure of his presumption that a talented “maestro” can orchestrate prosperity by setting himself up as the monetary central planner of the economy.
In fact, the current crisis has vindicated Ayn Rand’s warnings. Haven’t the financial markets collapsed every time a bureaucrat comes on TV to explain how he is planning to “rescue” them? And the policies of the current administration are about to prove Ayn Rand right once again, and perhaps more fully than ever before, by demonstrating what happens when we sacrifice more and more of the nation’s productive minds to provide handouts for the beggars.
Far from facing growing rejection, Ayn Rand’s ideas are the mostly unnamed fuel giving fire and confidence to people like Rick Santelli. Even if they don’t fully accept Ayn Rand ideas, their encounter with her writings gives them the confidence to declare that they have earned their wealth and that they have a right to keep it and enjoy it.
That’s the Ayn Rand factor we are observing now — and we need more of it.
If we’re going to have an ideological Boston Tea Party, a declaration of independence from the whole theory behind state management of our lives and wealth, then Ayn Rand is the ideal philosophical hostess.
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 11:21 am
As I’ve mentioned before the govt could do worse than implement across the board a giant Lean/Six Sigma initiative that will drive out costs, reduce cycle times, reduce variation in service delivery and result in a much more efficient approach.
One of the Health Boards did this a few years ago and it resulted in extreme service performance at no extra cost.
That’s what it can do.
Implementing it across the board rather than dept-by-dept makes a whole lot of sense, because a lot of inefficiency is generated by handovers between depts – e.g. the interactions between MSD and Police and Immigration and IRD is but one of many, thousands, of examples. You cannot significantly improve processes if you simply take a silo-based approach – that’s just bullshit. This principle applies not just within a single organisation but also where, as in govt, you have multiple organisations all operating separate processes that are basically all trying to achieve the same objective. Clearly this is fucking nuts.
Do it one way, best practice, and apply right across the board.
Secondly, you get economies of scale in process improvement and the wider you look the more significant the improvements and thereby the economies you achieve. Having a centralised government-wide approach toward the whole initiative removes the possibility that different depts will try to achieve the same thing in different ways which is again fucking nuts because it involves wheel re-invention ad infinitum.
Depts will of course argue that they have unique issues and while it’s true all of them have certain unique processes, in many many cases in fact in the majority of cases, there are duplications galore. All it takes is a bit of high-level lateral thinking to expose those and deal with them one by one using a common approach.
That would save literally billions year on year on year. Any competent process improvement professional that doesn’t achieve ROI’s of several hundred % on every single project they do is either not competent or is being mis-directed by the decision-makers in their organisation. The ROI climbs into the billions the bigger you look and the highest possible in our country, happens to be the entire govt sector.
The opportunity cost of not doing this obviously climbs every year that it’s not done and frankly, it could be very easily calculated that if we were already doing this, we could have easily kept up the contributions to the super fund and funded all of the summit ideas from money saved elsewhere.
Obviously the bureaucrats will argue strongly against this, partly out of ignorance of how this approach works and partly out of turf-protection. Therefore the politicians are the only ones who have the authority to implement this and they will have to do it by decree and in such a way that any passive resistance from the depts is identified and dealt with immediately.
Lean Six Sigma has a mixed reputation in the market and that’s partly because it’s been misapplied strategically and partly because some of the people working in the field aren’t very good at what they do. When it’s done properly however, there is nothing absolutely nothing that can compete with it as a productivity improvement tool.
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Further to previous, there are heaps of sites, http://www.isixsigma.com/ is one of the better ones if you want to understand what it is.
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Oh yes that’s GE’s version of kaisan which was developed from the teaching of W.Edward Demming.
Good book to read called “Out of the Crisis” by W.Edward Demming who was known as the father of the Japanese industrial revival.
Demming was an American mathmetician who MacArthur seconded to Japan to revive their industry. A person who was shunned by the the Americans especially in the auto industry and the results are now totally apparent.
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Key is not stupid.
Vote:The way to achieve ‘the biggest shake up’, greatest productivity & to get the public sector [any organisation for that matter] ‘to reinvent themselves’ is to cut back their budgets. Line by line. Big time – Even whole areas of spending. Just watch!
February 28th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Not quite Viking2, GE developed it significantly and so did Motorola, in the late 80′s early 90′s. The big six/McKinsey/BCG/etc jumped on it as they are wont to do with their flavour of the month approach and used it to make themselves billions in fees as they spread it through their client bases. It’s developed significantly since those days and continues to grow as new techniques are developed and others are adjusted to deal specifically with service industries, since it started out as a manufacturing toolset.
It’s the culmination of a lot of prior work including Demmings. As you say, in the 50′s the Americans didn’t want to listen to Demming, the Japanese did, and that was the germination of the Japanese manufacturing industry that turned them into the world’s Number 2 economy. Silly ole Americans, eh?
BTW, I read an article last night indicating GE’s in big trouble right now.
If anyone thinks to raise that fact as an argument against the toolset, don’t. The two are quite separate issues. I hope I don’t need to waste time explaining why.
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Viking2; Jim Rogers, George Soros’ old right hand man, has been candidly advising entrepreneurs and technicians to emigrate to Asia where their input is appreciated – shades of Ayn Rand and John Galt.
With Obama/Pelosi/Reid in control in the USA and socialism ascendant everywhere, the world economy’s recovery is going to come from the “work and save” ethic of the Asians, and their small governments and humans wealth first attitudes, translating into low business-stifling regulation. Anglo Saxons of the future will be carrying coffee to Asian bosses.
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
“…..You won’t hear National saying as much. But the minority Government has quietly begun what in the end might be the biggest shake-up of the core public service since the 1980s…..”
Are others experiencing the phenomenon I am, that public schools who have been good customers of my services in the past are not spending a cent right now?
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
The most business stiffling regulation we have is the Reserve Bank Act. The basic tenet of the Act is to maintain stabilty which it can never do.
Vote:The reserve Bank Act should be about wealth generation for NZ and its citizens. Something that Peters always maintained.
Now that will cause a lot of yelling.
February 28th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
“……You won’t hear National saying as much. But the minority Government has quietly begun what in the end might be the biggest shake-up of the core public service since the 1980s…..”
AH. I have not given John Key enough credit. Brilliant, guys, masterly.
I have been complaining that Labour has never had the fair blame they deserve for stuffing up the NZ economy. National has cruised to an election victory, and now have the benefit of a whole lot of blissful ignorance and misplaced confidence on the part of NZ-ers. I suspect that there is a gentleman’s agreement to perpetuate this situation, between the main parties and the media. Labour and the media both don’t dare attack National, because it will precipitate a crash that in all justice, they will cop the blame for.
I have complained that this was all very well, but the NZ economy does not have a hope of growing its way back to sound health while the government has one hand tied behind its back having promised not to do a whole lot of stuff that is unpalateable to the Left and to NZ voters, dumbed down as they have been by our Lefty media.
But this is masterly stuff. Take the tough decisions and keep the lid on it, as part of the aforesaid agreement. If John Key has indeed pulled this off, sitting down in back rooms with the leaders of the Labour party and the nations media editors and program managers, I take my hat off to him. It just might work.
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Having watched Back Benchers, the crowd in the audience was so anti anything National had done (hissing booing and whistling). Wellington Govt workers are waking up to the fact that some may have a short work life, a bit like public workers. I find it hard to feel sorry for them if this is the way they carry on.
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Yes a lot of Wellington public servants should start practicing their new line – “would you like fries with that?”
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
No the real question is, ‘Would you like to super size that?’
Just like a Cullen blowout!!
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Philbest
This Ayn Rand cult is getting out of hand. Migrate to Asia, hell they value individualism and as for the “work and save” ethic of the Asians, and their small governments and humans wealth first attitudes, translating into low business-stifling regulation exactly which Asian country are you referring to?
Most if not all the Asian countries I can think of use protectionist measures to manipulate their economies and cronyism and racism to maintain the wealth within a small group. Hong-Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, China and all the rest are the same as far as I can think.
Individual freedom is important but as China has shown over 5000 years you don’t need democracy or complete individual freedom to advance. There are many ways to skin a cat or produce good copies at least.
Vote:February 28th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Heres a tip. Don’t invest in innner city WGN cafes, restaurants or bars.
Vote:March 1st, 2009 at 6:45 am
It will be good to see the public sector get it in the neck.
Vote: