KEY POINTS:
It's a familiar political tactic: politicians creating scapegoats to blame for society's problems. This enables them to promote their party by saying, "Vote for me and I'll fix those problems by dealing to the scapegoat".
One group of New Zealanders who are regular targets of this tactic are our public servants. It's easy to tell when they're being scapegoated because their attackers seek to abase them by labelling them bureaucrats or the bureaucracy.
Here's a recent example from National's health spokesman, Tony Ryall. The health bureaucracy is growing out of control, while far too many patients are forced to wait and wait for operations. This army of bureaucrats must be dealt with because it's contributed to declining productivity in health.
Is any of this true? The figures suggest otherwise. The number of public hospital managers and administrators has actually fallen since June 30, 2005. There were 9804 at June 30 this year, 22 fewer than in 2005. Health productivity has increased, not fallen. There were 6813 more elective surgery operations in the June 2007 year. And public hospitals have hired more doctors and nurses (5225) than managers and administrators (1921) since 1999.
True, that's a lot of administrators and managers but look at the volume of patients. Wellington's three public hospitals handled 86,000 admissions and treated 420,000 patients between 2003 and 2005 - and there are 37 other public hospitals. That's a lot of patients to manage and administer.
Surely it's better to have specialist administrators performing this work than doctors, nurses and other clinical staff. Blaming the bureaucrats for alleged problems in the health system doesn't stack up. So why do it? Because it provides a justification for cutting services, reducing government spending, and hopefully providing money for tax cuts. The reality is that the scope for freeing up money for tax cuts by cutting the public service is very limited, as only 2 per cent of the workforce is employed by public service departments.
But there are clear signs that National is planning to do this anyway. The party's state services spokesman, Gerry Brownlee, claimed in November that the public service is extremely swollen and bloated at the moment. As a result his party was looking at institutions established by the Government that we are unlikely to require.
Is the public service really swollen and bloated? Certainly it has grown since 1999 under Labour-led Governments. But that's because by the end of the 1990s National-led Governments had reduced the number of public servants to the lowest level since World War II. As a result, some government departments were unable to carry out core functions like preparing briefing papers for the incoming Government. A major rebuild was needed right across the public service because there were serious shortages of staff.
Today, government departments are hiring staff to meet demand for their services. For instance, in the year to June 2007 the Corrections Department hired 732 new staff to run three new prisons, while Inland Revenue employed an extra 371 staff to run new programmes such as KiwiSaver. At the end of November, 316,865 New Zealanders had signed up for KiwiSaver.
So can we afford to axe government departments in an attempt to pay for tax cuts? Absolutely not.
And this is not what the public wants, according to recent opinion surveys. Fifty-eight per cent of voters surveyed by Fairfax-Nielsen in November said the Government should use its cash surplus to invest in public services rather than providing tax cuts.
Our public servants and the institutions they work for are not perfect, but they are among the best in the world. This is proven by a Transparency International survey that rated New Zealand, Denmark and Finland as having the least corrupt public services out of 179 countries. Let's build on that foundation and make our public services even better through investment, not cuts.
