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.

For years the PSA has been fighting an uphill battle  for home support workers who suffer dreadful rates of pay and job insecurity. These workers, the majority of whom are female, support some of the most vulnerable people in our communities.

Now these dedicated workers have been disadvantaged even more. ACC has cut funding for home support workers who travel from job to job providing home care for people with injury. It has changed the rules and withdrawn funding for the first 20km and also reduced payments for some groups working on statutory holidays to ordinary time.

This is a reversal of a policy introduced a couple of years ago where it was recognised that travel costs and time were unfairly falling on those individuals who provided the home care. The PSA has discovered in negotiations with employers that this funding has been withdrawn and, like most cuts, the biggest effects will be felt by the most vulnerable and needy, in this case those incapacitated by injury and those who provide support for them.

In an industry marred by poor conditions of employment, a vulnerable workforce and service users who have little influence, ACC is targeting the poorest section of society who are not able to fight for themselves.

ACC’s new policies reinforce the perception that those at the top don’t give a damn about those at the bottom.