The Maryanne Thompson saga is finally drawing to a close with her guilty plea over falsifying qualifications.  The oddest thing about the court case yesterday was the State Services Commissioner presenting a Victim Impact Statement.  Who’s the victim here?  Apparently the State services as a whole and all State servants.  I don’t think  so.

I don’t see State servants being or acting as victims.  They haven’t and don’t need to take on board the responsibility for one individual’s wrong-doing.  In any walk of life, there will always be individuals who flout the rules, take advantage of trust, or are plain bad.  When someone in the business world breaks the law (not an infrequent occurrence), no one suggests the whole system of private enterprise has been victimised by this.

Iain Rennie was right to say that there is an impact on the general perception of trustworthiness of State services.  But Len Cook, the new head of the Institute of Public Administration, hit the nail right on the head when he said the real issue was how the system deals with individual cases of wrongdoing or corruption.

Trust and trustworthiness are vital ingredients of our system of government and public administration.  One falsified cv doesn’t undermine that, stupid (and unnecessary) as the action was.  But please, Iain Rennie, let’s not go down the path of claiming collective victimhood.

It’s great to see librarians come out fighting against a plan by Tauranga City Council to put a 50c per book charge on fiction. We’ve heard a lot of complaints in recent days about New Zealand’s shonky infrastructure, with electricity and telephone system failures. But the Tauranga proposal hits at another kind of infrastructure, a more fragile one – our collective intellectual capital. At a time when there is widespread concern about literacy rates and the impact of text-speak on the ability of younger New Zealanders to write well, the idea of putting a levy on reading is just plain bizarre. Not to mention putting New Zealand out of step with the rest of the western world, which recognises libraries as one of the foundations of the educational, information and cultural systems.

Free public libraries are a great public good in New Zealand and we have a proud tradition of excellent public library services. Far from being a “burden on the ratepayer”, they are probably one of the most valued local public services and the most widely-used.

And librarians are not afraid to stand up in defence of these bedrock values. The PSA – which represents most librarians – will be standing with them.

Here we go again.  Obviously John Key and Bill English didn’t make New Year’s resolutions to stop attacking the public service and especially its record on productivity.  The Herald reported Key’s comments that getting “value for money from state services” might mean job cuts as well as state servants working harder.

The PSA approached Bill English back in August and again in September 2009 with specific ideas to improve productivity.  No reply from Bill.  So we have deduced this is an ideological matter for the National government, not a genuine attempt to harness fresh thinking to make real gains.

An interesting post by Tim Watkin on Pundit has pointed out that, far from being bloated, the state sector is “borderline anorexic”.  Watkin’s article and the statistics in it are well worth a read, as are the comments that follow.  Watkin concludes:  “A strong public service remains the foundation stone of a decent society…Any chance we can value its work, rather than constantly maligning it?”

I hope someone puts these comments in front of Key and English.  If Key’s Government is serious about lifting public service productivity, it should focus on making public service employers more flexible and open to new ideas. Much has been said about importance of frontline staff, but little attempt has been made to engage them in day-to-day decision-making and use their valuable experiences and insights to build more responsive organisations.

Endless tinkering to shed jobs here and there will do nothing to build an efficient public sector for the 21st century.

It’s been a busy year for the PSA and for all those who work in the public sector. We’re looking forward to the holiday break. We will resume blogging early in the new year.  Best wishes to all  for  the holiday season.

Here we go again. Another taskforce serving as a stalking horse for the ‘free market’ policies the government would love to implement but knows the public is nervous about.  The latest government-appointed Trojan horse to issue a report is the Capital Market Development Taskforce.

It’s recommending  opening up state assets to the market. In other words partial privatisation. Or as the taskforce puts it: “broadening the range of high-quality equity offerings for retail investors by encouraging partial listings of central and local government-owned companies…”

Taskforce chair Rob Cameron says there needs to be large scale sales of state assets.  And Commerce Minister Simon Power says the government will look at this – though not in its first term.

But I think we can all see where this is heading.  Partial privatisation in the first term.  The full monty in term two.

The government is already actively pursuing its privatisation agenda. We’ve got private management of public prisons, possible private ownership and management of schools, possible sell-off of water from local councils. All the signs point to full-scale privatisations in a second term.

The question is why? If these state assets are such high quality, why would the current owners- the public who’ve paid for them through their taxes – want to sell them? Who benefits? ‘Free marketers’ hungry for productive assets to feed on after bringing the world’s financial markets to the brink of collapse.

Last week we saw Don Brash provide a flashback to the 1990s with the 2025 taskforce recommendations. Most of us would find recycled advice on preparing for the Y2k disaster more helpful and relevant now than Brash’s horror set of recommendations.

But Don’s not the only one living in the past. We still see the same old tactics wheeled out in negotiations. A favourite of the 90s under the ECA was to make small offers at the bargaining table and in parallel make the offer to non-members and anyone else wanting to opt out of bargaining. The idea being that collective bargaining can be weakened by cash offers to workers to abandon the collective effort. That is exactly what MOJ  is  hoping to do currently by going out to non-union members with the offer rejected by the union.

Another was for an employer who finds themselves under immense pressure in bargaining, to respond by suddenly announcing a change in policy to apply to all staff thereby trying to deny any gain to the collective bargaining process.  IRD famously did it a decade ago with redundancy improvements and now Parliamentary Services are suddenly reviewing their performance pay policy and announcing pay improvements for everyone, when everyone knows the gains were achieved in collective bargaining.

Has nothing been learned since the 90s? PSA members want to move on and do not want to relive what will go down in history as a dreadful decade for labour relations and workers’ interests. Those stuck in the time warp need to wake up to the fact that there is no future in the past.

Hearing Bill English say something I can agree with is always worth a comment, so it was good to hear him say that he is looking for a stronger dose of reality from the tax task force than he – and we – got from Don Brash’s productivity task force. Let’s hope we see that.

I’d like to know what it cost the government to have Don Brash prepare and deliver what amounts to a party political manifesto for Act. And to rub salt in the wound, it appears that the task force will be kept on to deliver a further report each year. Given that the report has been rubbished by everyone except the Business Roundtable and Act, it’s hard to see the justification for keeping Don Brash on the public payroll. Not exactly a shining example of public sector productivity. But there seems few limits on the government’s willingness to spend public money to keep its coalition partners happy.

There is something particularly hypocritical about the behaviour of Act MPs. The party of small government and individual responsibility seems very willing to milk the public purse for all its worth. At least Rodney Hide had the decency (and political nous) to apologise for his travel spending. Not so Roger Douglas, who is apparently unrepentant. He is clearly becoming an embarrassment even to Act – Rodney Hide conspicuously did not defend Roger Douglas when questioned recently on Radio NZ about his travel spending.

The coalition agreement between Act and National seems designed to use public money to prop up Act. It’s time National got some new friends.

How to close the 35% income gap with Australia by 2025?  An ambitious goal like that calls for some fresh ideas. But that’s not what the Government has got from the 2025 Taskforce, headed by Don Brash.

Instead of looking forward 15 years to 2025, the Taskforce’s report, released today, seems to be looking back 15 years and beyond to when New Zealand’s  productivity relative to Australia plummeted.

Practically all of the recommendations look like a wish list of neo-liberal policies which have been tried and only increased the wealth of the very few at the expense of the many and the national interest.

Most of the recommendations have been made many times before. Treasury, Roger Douglas, the Business Roundtable and Ruth Richardson have all pushed the same old “cut taxes, cut regulation, cut the public sector” recipe for every challenge the country meets. It doesn’t matter what the question is, the answer is always the same from these people.

Just as in Nicky Hager’s The Hollow Men, Brash is again the leader of a group of New Zealanders who have nothing to offer but more misery for the poor and the vulnerable. There is no chance that this wish list of failed policies will help us catch Australia unless Australia experiences an unmitigated disaster sometime soon.

Surely addressing productivity requires a serious attempt to encourage high performance workplaces and a culture of continuous improvement. If Brash and co really want to improve public sector performance they could start by calling on the central agencies – the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the State Services Commission and the Treasury – to work with the PSA in developing the leadership and skills required for transforming the workplace into a high performance culture.

Productivity is partly about eliminating waste – ironically this whole 2025 exercise has so far been one big waste.

The Director General of Health organised an excellent event last Friday called ‘Productivity, Quality and Performance Improvement 2010/2011’. It was a gathering of employers, MOH officials and union leaders from the DHB sector. All of these parties have committed to work together on improving health sector productivity under the Health Sector Relationship Agreement.

Several presentations were made by overseas as well as local speakers about successful productivity initiatives. Most of these initiatives demonstrated an understanding and commitment to changing the culture of workplaces from the old style top down approaches of management to more team-based facilitative styles associated with lean systems thinking. A real sense of urgency and the need for a fundamentally transformational approach was embraced by participants.

Contrast that with what we keep hearing in the core public service. Apart from a couple of exceptions, everyone from cabinet ministers down seem to be all talk and no action when it comes to responding to the union’s demands for better and more productive ways of working. Instead, we hearing ‘you can’t measure productivity in the public service’ or ‘we’ve already done it’. The PSA keeps pushing the view that continuous improvement is never ‘done’ and while measurement is not straightforward, these issues are not an excuse for inaction.

PSA members are up for the challenge because they know that part of the secret to better productivity is better management. The question remains are employers, the SSC or the Ministers up for this challenge too or do they feel threatened by a transformational agenda?

Yet again, New Zealand’s public service is rated at the least corrupt in the world by Transparency International.  It seems the reputation and value of our public service is well-recognised abroad but the absence of any acknowledgement of this by the government, including the Minister of State Services, is noticeable.

By a curious coincidence, this announcement was made on the same day as the Treasury came out with its well-worn advice to the government to cut public spending drastically.  Perhaps it’s time they got some new thinking at Treasury as no-one in this (or the previous) government seems to think their advice is credible.

John Key doubted their analysis, Bill English commented that they have been saying the same thing for the past 20-30 years and he did not plan to follow their advice.  He does, however, plan to cut planned public spending at the next Budget.  We know that departments have been directed yet again to prune their budgets and that another round of cost-cutting by the razor gang is planned for next March.

Next year’s Budget will be a tough one for the public service, which is already under pressure from the 2000 job reduction imposed on it this year.  And wage pressures will need to be dealt with in the Budget.  The government’s intended wage freeze is simply not working, as can be seen by the industrial action being taken by Ministry of Justice and Parliamentary Services PSA members at the moment.

Transparency International gives us one reason why we should value our public servants.  We’d like to see this government value their own public service too.