Bill Ralston: Government shows who's boss

Working on the "poacher turned gamekeeper" theory, National has hired half a dozen former top civil servants as "purchase advisers" to its fledgling ministers.

Their task is to keep the big spending departments under control, help trim the budgets and prevent the ministers from getting "snowed" by the bureaucrats.

From the moment it came to power, this Government has been justifiably paranoid about "push back" from the state sector; the "Yes, Minister" syndrome of obstruction and confusion that public servants are adept at doing to unwary politicians who try to dabble in their business.

Who better to act as watchdogs for the ministers than the former bosses of some of these departments?

It was a cunning move by Finance Minister Bill English who is staring down the barrel of a bleak budget armed with few options.

The enormous growth of the public service over the past decade, in numbers and spending, has been well documented, and few department heads will want to trim their empires.

Hence the need for politically appointed advisers who know the bureaucratic ropes and can railroad through the changes the Government needs to happen.

In some respects the last Labour Administration reverted to the practice of past governments, 30 or 40 years ago, of burying unemployment in an expanded state sector.

In the middle of the last century, those who might otherwise have ended up in the dole queues were accommodated within the state-owned Railways, Post Office, or Ministry of Works. When these heavily padded organisations were sold off or severely downsized in the 80s, unemployment figures ballooned.

As Labour returned to power in the new millennium it began re-absorbing some of those numbers into the public sector, especially in social services areas it had targeted for increased spending.

The non-productive portion of departmental budgets, centred on administration and process, became increasingly padded at the expense of "frontline" services that actually deliver some social dividend to the taxpayer.

National is trying to reverse this trend and several ministers privately report meeting stiff opposition from within the threatened bureaucracy.

Sinking in the quagmire of recession, English has not got time to wait for an eventual resolution as new ministers slowly exert their power. A couple of billion dollars short on the tax take, he needs results now.

Predictably, Labour is crying foul. National is politicising the public service, it claims. It has appointed people in a public service role, using taxpayer money, who are accountable only to the minister.

That is correct.

However, National is doing this precisely because it cannot trust the traditional public service, after more than a decade of self-indulgence, to discipline itself and become more efficient on its own.

Labour's Chris Hipkins describes this as a backdoor way of funding politically sympathetic advisers to do the National Government's work.

Again, he is probably right, but the Byzantine ways and means of some government departments can be almost unfathomable to an outsider, such as a new minister who is trying to enforce a stricter regime.

English acknowledges this when he says, "We've been able to make significant savings because we've had people helping ministers who know how the system works."

The point is we elect governments to govern. If an administration is being hamstrung and subverted by a self-interested and unelected public service it is entitled to find ways of ensuring its goals are met.

There is an argument New Zealand should look at the US system, in which top officials are approved by Congress. It can be a relatively lengthy and arduous process when there is a change in administrations, but it ensures the Government's political will is carried through more deeply into the public service.

In theory, it allows an administration a wider range of talent to choose from when it comes to leading the public service; a president can pick "the best and the brightest" from business and academia, not just long-serving bureaucrats.

Currently, Foreign Minister Murray McCully is engaged in a bit of a battle with his own department over who should next head the ministry.

It seems McCully would prefer someone from the private sector as the next head of Foreign Affairs; the ministry is naturally fighting for one of its own to do the job.

It raises the question: why should a career diplomat automatically hold that role?

Why shouldn't the minister have the choice to go for, say, a top businessman experienced in trade or a leading expert in international relations from a university? If that makes him or her a "political appointee" who is likely to carry through government policy, what is the problem?

Every three years we get to elect a government. Sadly, we never get the chance to vote for the people who actually run the show.