More dishonesty
March 18th, 2009 at 11:00 am by David FarrarNo Right Turn is claiming that National has given an edict for 10% spending cuts across the board. I don’t know if he is deliberately misrepresenting the situation, or genunely does not know the difference between identifying potential savings/cuts and automatically cutting them.
The actual article he quotes, makes it clear the Government has not mandated 10% cuts:
The Government has denied having an overall target for cuts from its current “line-by-line” review, and the advice to public sector chiefs stops short of saying cuts of that magnitude will be made.
What the Government has said is:
Using your detailed knowledge of both the department and sector … can you identify the spending that delivers the lowest value for money, say, the bottom 5 per cent and 10 per cent.
To be honest this should happen every year, not just in a fiscal crisis. The scandal is that this never happened under Labour it seems.
This is not saying every programme in that bottom 5% or 10% will be cut. Iit is saying we want you to go through those programmes of the lowest value so we can then discuss which ones remain and which ones do not.
Anyone who has ever worked in the real world will have been through such an exercise themselves. Even non profits regularly do this – identify the lower priority programmes so a decision can be made on whether to do them or not.
If No Right Turn’s hysteria is correct, then every Government Department will have 10% less funding in the budget in May. I would be willing to bet that not a single Department will have 10% less funding. English has said that generally the cuts have been around 1% to 2%.
NRT also tries to keep repeating the lie that one has to cut this spending to pay for the tax cuts:
And all so National’s rich friends can get their tax cuts.
And again this is not true. National’s tax cuts were fiscally neutral due to the reduction in KiwiSaver subsidies.
Finally we have the best comedy line of the week:
contrary to the right’s propaganda, there is precious little fat in the public service to trim
Hilarious. NRT should try talking to some peopel who actually work in the public service. They are full of stories about waste and fat.
Related posts:
- Spending Cuts in the UK
- Herald on Spending
- Scope for further tax cuts say economists
- Peters wants superannuation to be even less sustainable
March 18th, 2009 at 11:11 am
NRT wrote:
To be fair to NRT he is historically correct. During the last Labour Government, there wasn’t any fat in the public service to trim. This was because nobody went looking for any potential savings or analysis of low-value programmes and priorities. If you don’t go looking for it, you don’t find it.
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Regrettably NRT has lost the plot in this area.
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 11:26 am
I would be willing to bet that not a single Department will have 10% less funding.
I’ll take that bet. I’m pretty confident the TEC budget will be at least 10% less than it was last year.
[DPF: Vote Tertiary Education will not be 10% less]
[DPF: But yes you are right that the operation costs will probably be over 10% less. As the job of TEC used to be done by 25 staffers and is now over 400, I think it is an excellent example that reductions are being done on the basis of value, not a 10% target]
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 11:36 am
I certainly hope NRT is correct. The rest of us are having to survive on less. Why should we be paying exhorbitant taxes so overpaid civil servants can frequent all those Wellington eateries ?
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 11:45 am
You may find that TEC is too small to qualify as a Department or Ministry of the Government.
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 11:56 am
NRT is a fucking idiot and a coward who hides behind his no comments policy…why he’s even bothered with by anyone else is a mystery.
There is an Everest of fat that can be slashed from the bloated girth of the NZ economy…..Racing,Arts,anything begining with “Womens” or Childrens”…..Communist commision,race relations, etc etc…
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
People with chips on their shoulders talk a lot of sh*t on internet forums. Keep pointing it out!
But all this faux outrage a la “More lies” “more dishonesty”etc just cheapens Kiwiblog IMHO…
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Political blogging without accusations of lies and dishonesty, is that even possible?
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I like NRT. I don’t like 90% of what it has to say. But the blog itself is excellent.
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
gingercrush
It’s not really a blog is it. As a site it is less interactive than stuff. At least stuff lets you post feedback which it sometimes publishes.
What I think is funny is that Idiot/Savant comments on other peoples blogs and defends criticism of stuff he posts on his blog when it is being discussed on other blogs. He must be one very insecure dude. His spin is often pretty lame which is I guess why comments are not tolerated. Hell even Trotter allowed people to disagree with him on his own turf.
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
DPF
I think that any posts you make about NRT should have comments turned off. Say what you think and state the position as you see it then not allow anybody to contradict what you say. Let NRT have a taste of how pathetic and insecure he is.
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Oh BTW: Anybody who disagrees with me – please comment on a different forum. I don’t want what I have stated as being the absolute truth sullied by your noise and nonsense. Please no negative karma or I’ll cry. Thankyou.
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Well as one who has worked for 35 years in organisations ranging from large multinationals to large nationals to SMEs to NFPs a review of expenditure has always been an ongoing event
For NRT in the real world it goes like this. You develop a Budget for the next financial year You examine every line of income and expenditure looking maximise the former and minimise the latter.
You then constantly monitor the actual results against the budget usually at least monthly sometimes weekly sometimes daily looking for variances and trends so you can quickly modify the operations to meet the changing conditions
In the successful organisations ( almost all) I have worked this has been such a standard process that you just do it.
It aint rocket science and never was.
Any Government department not doing the above should have its CEO taking out and terminated with extreme prejudice.
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
BTW IMHO the Government departments are in such a shambles budget wise that they must revert to Zero based.
For NRT and others.
This is where you start from scratch and build a budget based on evidence and sound principles.
NOT just adding an amount onto last years years actual and making as big as you figure you can con the approver into agreeing with as I suspect has been the case in the past.
Yes I know this would be a radical step and change but we do live in changing times NOT that the PSA cardy wearers extraordinaire can comprehend
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
gd – good comment (apart from the cardy wearing thing – shame on you!)
This leftie agrees, the Govt departments should have to justify all of next year’s budget in terms of what they actually need to spend money on achieving this year – not just “Well we got $134 million last year, so allowing for inflation this year’s budget should therefore be…”
So long as it does not cost millions to do this. I imagine that (for example) their basic core staffing requirements would be reasonably steady from year to year, and the time and effort taken to justify every position, every photocopier servicing contract etc from first principles once every 12 months would cost something to do, too…
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
GD – good comments. I used to hold ‘budget challenge’ sessions with all the budget holders that worked for me, ensuring they understood and could justify EVERY dollar they wanted to spend irrespective of their revenue or overhead cost centre type.
In NZ Government, there is a thing called “The Base Line”, which would appear to be an amount the agency is ‘entitled’ to, and only amounts over and above that base line are challenged. Why this is so, I have no idea, however, I have seen personally a project justified as ‘over base’ in one year and subsequently approved as a three year expenditure that in year four was claimed as being part of the base line as it was a fully operational ‘department’! Worse, I have seen projects to develop policy in a specific area (e.g. a policy on how to handle the processing of all ‘infringement charges’ through a central agency,) put up as ‘above and beyond base line policy advice’ and justified as a FIVEYEAR , MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR, PROJECT.
No fat – I would suggest that finding any lean meat is the hard part!
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Ratbiter, I have to disagree!
A suggestion that all photocopiers in one of the biggest Ministries be set to automatically print double-sided, which would – based on experience – have reduced the photocopying and paper expenditure account by some 35%, was referred to a committee for consideration four years ago. That committee has yet to report its final findings!
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Sorry Ratbiter I get carried away some times You and the other lefties just feel free to reign me in when I go OTT
In all the excitement of the NEW ADMINISTRATION its very hard to contain ones self
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
THIS is going the rounds on the net:
Memorandum To: Citizens of NZ | Mar 10, 2009
A public service manager writes:
“You don’t often hear from us. I’m one of the people who manages the machine that digests forms and sends out cheques (and takes your money, of course).The reason you don’t hear from us much is because we aren’t allowed to talk to you much. We’re only allowed to speak through our “corporate communications” in case we say something the wrong way. Because if we fumble our message a bit, The Media tend to leap on our every stuff up and blow it up into a Big Deal. So I’m afraid that means you get a bland, partially digested diet of bullshit most of the time. But I’m sure most of you realise that.Anyway, I wanted to let you know that we have noticed that times are getting hard. We aren’t smugly sitting here in our ivory towers, gazing out at you poor souls in the private sector thinking “phew, at least my jobs safe”. That’s for two reasons. Firstly, it isn’t. Our jobs I mean. Probably more secure than many of yours, but we do still worry. But mainly it’s because most of us do actually give a shit.What we tend to do (certainly for our first few years in the public sector) is think of great ideas to make our systems more efficient. Often we’ll find a sympathetic manager and say “why don’t we do X? That would make things easier / cheaper / faster for people”.Then we hit the problem. You see, we’re drowning. Our collective heads are almost disappearing under the waves because of lots of well-meaning law and process that has actually resulted in a bad outcome. These things were done with the best of intentions, based on good theory. But when coupled with media serving people with the attention span of a goldfish, have ended up making it impossible to actually get anything done.On top of that, we’ve seen lots of Head Office bloat in the last few years. Rooms of endless meetings going on and on about “Vision” and “Strategy” … interesting how the best private sector firms don’t stuff around with all that. I have a feeling that we felt a bit inadequate because we didn’t have all the things that CEOs in big private businesses get to play with – you know, HR strategies and Corporate Compliance units. We just had a thing called The Law, which we have to carry out.I saw this thing in a book once about how people in the institutional banks in the UK used to get posted if they weren’t doing too well: FILTHK (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong). I have to wonder if people who fail in the private sector sometimes end up being posted to Wellington (and it is a noticeably Wellington issue…). To be clear, I don’t think these people are malicious or stupid. I just think they are, well, a bit distant from reality. They’ve started to believe the management books and “Best Practice” guides.I’ve got dozens of examples from my own place, but, as I’m terrified of being identified because Talking to the Public is a Bad Thing, I’ll have to cover my tracks a bit.We have a surplus of lawyers in NZ. In most countries they are kept busy suing Councils for footpaths that trip people up – and you can’t do that here, so they have to find something else to do. It seems they tend to end up in the public sector, over analysing statutes and interpreting them in the worst possible way (because many of them have never worked in the real world – they come straight from law school). Acts get over analysed, and rarely with any thought as to what an ordinary person would think. And because it’s not The Done Thing for a government department to end up in Court to clarify a legal point, the theoretical “legal opinion” tends to be accepted and not tested.For example, the Official Information Act was designed to make sure that public servants can’t cover up when they stuff up. Or that the truth be revealed so that we can all make the right decision.It has clauses that say (and I’m converting to plain English because you know what laws read like…) “stuff need not be released if it would mean public servants would feel they couldn’t have full and frank discussions”.After the lawyers end up stuffing around with it, this means that everything is discoverable. So we end up either a) writing ‘draft’ on everything (this makes it less likely to be released) or b) not saying it at all.This means nobody in, say, the NZ Police can ever write down an argument that might be true, but is a bit contentious. For example, the statement “Were illicit drugs decriminalised in a carefully regulated way, it would free up 4000 police officers, halve the prison population and destroy the power base of organised crime in NZ” would never be put in a document even if just for discussion, because it contradicts policy and the media would have a field day with it. Quite rightly, because it needs to be discussed. It becomes an unwritten truth, one of those things that we Can’t Do Anything About, so we roll our eyes and carry on beating our heads against an impossible problem.Another good example is all the law around careful management of public money. Great intentions, but combined with a culture that says “the auditor is always right [and believe me, they're not most of the time - if you can't do, teach. And if you are really crap, become an auditor] then you end up in a situation where stupid rules are put in place so that rather than have someone take responsibility for a decision, a committee is formed and reports are written. This means there’s a thing called an ‘audit trail’ so you can completely fail to identify who stuffed up if something goes wrong.We call it “all hold hands and make a decision”.I recently heard of a situation where a project was completed ahead of schedule, on time and under budget. Much of this was that the person running it didn’t bother waiting for pointless meetings and reports. Instead he just got on and did it, thereby saving the taxpayer two hundred thousand dollars. The audit report on the project flagged it as being very “high risk” in a number of areas. The best bit was the audit report was completed after the project was finished! So they knew it had worked at the time of writing! Did this guy get a medal for being pragmatic and sensible? No, he gets called in for a Stern Talking To. Will he ever try and do anything like that again? I doubt it. And we’re all poorer.Here’s one of my favourites. There was an article in a law newsletter recently that held up a case of a sacking by the IRD as a perfect example of how to get rid of a useless employee. I’m guessing they went through committees and panels to appoint him in the first place. I expect there were several people who thought he shouldn’t have been hired, but they hired him anyway, because after all they’d followed “The Process”.Reading between the lines, when they realised he simply couldn’t do the job they started The Process of sacking him. It took three years, and then another four years in court. Eventually he lost. But this is held up as the perfect way to sack someone! If it had been the private sector he would have been out on his ear and awarded a few grand by a tribunal. On our side of the fence we spend (I’m guessing) hundreds of thousands of dollars on The Process, because the CEO (and minister) might get beaten up in the press over the payout.When we buy stuff, there are laws to say how it must be done. These have been around for years. They were designed to reduce the cost of stuff ups. Interestingly, what they’ve done is replaced the chance of a cost blow out with a guarantee of spending far more than necessary on paperwork and “Governance”. In the private sector, a typical project budgets 15 – 30% of cost for management and administration.In the public sector it starts at 30%. Because the rules a blindly applied, it means there’s a minimum set of paperwork for everything. These aren’t meant to be applied across the board, but woe betide you if you get caught out trying to save some money and then an Issue arises. Years of habit and cover-your-arse have developed a generation of public servants who live by meetings, committees and reports. And a bunch of auditors who NEVER say “it was pleasing to see that processes were not followed unnecessarily, thereby saving the taxpayer X million dollars”.So here’s the thing my fellow citizens. In a democracy you get the government you deserve.There are lots of us that want to get on and make things better. But we’re never going to do it while these beat-ups carry on. When people like the over-worked probation officer who decided that William Bell didn’t need to be closely monitored (let’s face it, he was just a drunk on parole after his first offence…) stuff up, bear in mind that that event is going to result in a plague of new paperwork that probably won’t make any practical difference. When you call for “consultation” or “inquiries”, all that happens generally is that several millions of dollars are spent and everything just stops.You need to let your MP know that you don’t believe the headlines that are written by a copywriter in Australia (have you noticed how the headline often contradicts the story?) and that talkback is a minority of nutters that don’t represent your views.Because only when the normal, sane, silent majority of sensible Kiwis make themselves heard will we start to unravel all the crap law and policy that has built up like fat in a middle aged artery over the last twenty years. We need to be able to sprint at the moment, and it just ain’t happening.Now I just need to wait while they hunt me down…”
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Ratbiter and gd that is very good common sense except for the fact that lines in the sand has been drawn as far as expenditure for value goes. At best your take would stop the escalation. However you have the problem at the moment that : To take a potato from the bag to the pot cost just $20. We have the picker upper ($2.50) The picker upper supervisor (3.00) the Picker upper safety and equality officer (3.20) Then there is the carrier to the pot ($1.00) the carrier supervisor (1.50) The compliance officer that made sure they used the correct hand to pass it over (2.70). The potato is then passed to the putter inner ($2.50) and supervisor ($2.50). Now the true cost of the potato carry is $0.25 because one person can carry ten at a time. So if we need to find waste we need to get external assessment of practice and fast. Saying hat this year we only need 100 potatoes compared to the 200 last year means that we save $2000 is just not enough.
If those cost are not reeled in, then that money will not be available to help those who will really need it in another month or three.
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
burt (2510) 4 3 Says:
March 18th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
“Oh BTW: Anybody who disagrees with me – please comment on a different forum. I don’t want what I have stated as being the absolute truth sullied by your noise and nonsense. Please no negative karma or I’ll cry. Thankyou.”
Biting irony from Burt re certain leftwing blogs. I don’t quite understand why he deserves that negative karma for it.
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
dave strings One of the very first lessons I learnt from an early Director mentor was to watch out for the trick of ‘outsourcing” a cost whilst still manitaining the internal cost in the P&L.
Believe me I lost count of the number of times over the years Ive picked this one up.
thats why I am very suspicious n to know how Government departments control this one I was especially concerned in the early days mid late 80s etc of this “outsourcing’ .
Its just so easy to pull the wool on a newbie
Vote:March 18th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
It’s not like National want to reduce the size of government. They just want to find savings from Labour’s lame programs and then promptly piss that money away again on all new pet projects that National has thought up. Same old problem of poor value for money though.
As David points out, National’s tax cuts are revenue neutral. Not exactly the bold tax cuts promised in 2005. I’m guessing the current National government believes they can spend taxpayers money better than the taxpayer can.
Vote: