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.

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.

An experienced advocate will always be suspicious of very round numbers. And so it is with bargaining at the Ministry of Justice where MOJ are publicly saying – the PSA is claiming $100 million to settle the current pay dispute.

In fact the PSA has not sought any such figure. We know from experience that anything as round as $100 million is almost certainly an exaggeration one way of another and so is this. The PSA has simply stated that there is a very significant gap between what MOJ staff are being paid and what they should be paid according to MOJ’s own analysis using the Public Service median survey data. 1200 staff are paid 9.3 % less than they should be.

Our negotiating team is seeking solutions to this unsustainable problem and not getting any buy-in from the employer.  Amongst other things we have identified the need to eliminate wasteful systems and better manage resources.

Now the Government has made it clear that increases in pay mean fewer services. That equation has inevitably thrown up in members’  minds the question ‘does this mean we are subsidising the current Justice system to the tune of $100 million by accepting the wages we are getting?’.

PSA members are tired of being taken for granted, especially in light of the large bonuses being paid to senior staff in the state sector.

The public must be mystified that an organisation like ACC with more than $10 billion in reserves is in such financial strife that the Government is forced to reduce pay-outs and put up levies. And why, they may wonder, if ACC is such a financial liability, are private insurers lining up to get a slice of the action?

The truth appears to be that this ACC crisis has been manufactured to prepare the public for its privatisation. For years, ACC worked perfectly well as ‘a pay as you go’ scheme. It was- and still is- the envy of the world, a no-fault accident compensation scheme that provides security for workers and employers alike.

Now it’s deemed to be $4.8 billion in the red because it is required to “pre-fund” future obligations. However, as Tim Hazledine, Professor of Economics at the University of Auckland, pointed out in the NZ Herald, this is a bit like asking parents to pay upfront to meet the future obligations to their children. Since that sum would be several hundred thousand dollars, most parents could be deemed to be “broke; busted; bankrupt”.

Interestingly, employers are not so enamoured with the idea of handing over ACC to private insurers. “Having a full private insurance market won’t provide stability in the premium setting market, and it would make more forecasting and budgeting work for employers,” says Paul Jarvie, Occupational Health and Safety Manager for the Northern Employers and Manufacturers Association.

The only winners from privatising ACC are the same as those who benefit from the expensive and dysfunctional US health system – multinational insurance companies and the lawyers.

It’s not so much that public sector CE’s have had another pay rise that irks PSA members. After all they have enormous responsibility in their jobs and should be paid fairly. What is annoying is that senior public servants and politicians are telling everyone else that they are undeserving and that it would be irresponsible to increase pay for those who work in the engine room and the front line of the public service.

The SSC is trying to argue that these pay rises are only for the period that went from July 08 to June 09 and from here on restraint will apply. That is all very well if you have just received a five-figure increase on top of your six-figure salary. I suspect our members at Parliamentary Service, at Ministry of Justice(MOJ) and the clerical staff working in the South Island DHBs would accept some restraint if they enjoyed these sort of increases in the last year.

But, of course, nothing could be further from reality. The clerical staff have had a pay freeze for years, the Parliamentary Service staff are being offered a reduction in collective agreement and MOJ staff have been told that they will continue to slip even further behind the public sector median as they have been for the last few years.

What’s lacking is any sense of fairness. The pay systems are completely lacking credibility already and now parliamentarians and senior public servants are getting rises while reminding everyone else of the tough times we’re in. Nobody is fooled by the double standards.

Anyone with any real knowledge of events reading the large ‘We Apologise’ advertisements in the NZ Herald today and in recent days will see it for what it is – just spin. The ads are about the lockout of bus drivers but the word ‘lockout’ doesn’t appear of course.

Instead we get an explanation full of threatened industrial activity by unions, strike notices and suspensions that could not be helped. The apology portrays the company as having no choice in the matter because of the unions’ strike action, which has one way or another caused the disruption to the public on the week schools start back from holidays.

But, of course, it’s the employer who has stopped the services – not the union. The union has said the workers will keep working for what they are contracted for, but in view of the inadequate response from employers in bargaining, they will not be going the extra mile at the moment and they will do no extras. That’s what ‘working to rule’ is.

In fact the workers have even offered to take kids to school without pay and while they are being locked out if the employer is willing to allow them to.

The employer’s apology is hollow and once again goes to show that some employers cannot be relied upon to communicate fairly to the public or the workforce during bargaining and especially during disputes.