Editorial: No such thing as a free lunch

File photo / Hawke's Bay Today

The dust had no sooner settled over revelations about cabinet ministers' misuse of their official credit cards than the spending of the country's top public servants came under the spotlight.

Public service chief executives ran up $431,000 in the 2008-09 financial year and $382,000 in the year to last month.

All of it appeared to be work-related - which is not to say it was all justified or justifiable - but in releasing the figures, State Services Commissioner Iain Rennie highlighted "excessive" spending on wining and dining.

The $66,105 bill of the then Executive Director of the Food Safety Authority, Andrew McKenzie, included $1119 for a "staff recognition" lunch for 10 at the upscale Logan Brown restaurant in Wellington.

Anybody who's picked up the tab at Logan Brown will know that a bill of $112 a head suggests considerable self-restraint. But that's hardly the point. By any standard, and at any time, it was wrong.

Rennie disclosed the spending in response to a request under the Official Information Act. Perhaps he would have called the matter to public attention and the chief executives to account in any case, but there is no reason to believe so.

To his credit, however, he dealt with the matter in forthright fashion. He has undertaken to make quarterly disclosures in future and is considering following the practice in Canada, where the credit-card spending of all senior staff, not just of chief executives, is made public.

Rennie conceded that "some expenditure - particularly on food and alcohol for staff - appears to be excessive" and added that he had spoken to all chief executives regarding expenditure on entertainment and he "expected they would adjust their spending accordingly". That much should go without saying - but it is a minimum rather than a complete response.

There is no evidence - nor even a reasonable suggestion - that expenditure by senior civil servants is out of control.

Helen Anderson, the former Chief Executive of the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, who had run up a credit card bill of $52,589, argued quite cogently that it falls to senior public servants to "host international visitors and position New Zealand on the international stage".

And anyone who thinks that taking international colleagues to dinner is unalloyed pleasure probably doesn't get out enough.

Using meals at flash restaurants as "staff recognition" is another matter entirely.

The expense was incurred during a period when the country was entering a widely foreshadowed period of recession, where unemployment was rising and financial hardship hitting more and more New Zealand families and when cuts in public spending portended jobs losses and reductions in services.

Despite promising economic indicators through most of this year that we were emerging from recession, new jobless figures suggest we are far from out of the woods.

Exercising prudence in public spending was and remains not just a matter of taste, but of financial necessity.

The public service in this country has undergone a generation of radical transformation. Senior salaries have risen to compete with those in the private sector, whose management paradigms have become part of public-sector lore.

In the process, much has been gained - we don't wait a couple of years to get the phone on these days - but there is a danger that something has been lost as well.

Nobody of any sense would be urging a return to the Glide Time days of the tea trolley and clock-watchers in cardigans. But public servants should beware of developing a management-class sense of entitlement. Secretary to the Treasury John Whitehead, who shouted dinner for 25 staff when they stayed back for a late meeting had it about right: Pizza for 25, $238.60. That sounds a bit more like it.