By Chris Trotter*
The absence of anything resembling a fightback from the public servants currently losing their jobs is interesting. State-sector workers’ collective fatalism in the face of Coalition cutbacks indicates a surprisingly broad acceptance of impermanence in the workplace. Fifty years ago, lay-offs in the thousands would have engendered a much more aggressive response from the state-sector unions. The bonds of solidarity were a lot stronger then than they are now.
So, too, was the idea that public servants should not be laid-off in the same way as private sector workers. Offering workers in the state-sector a job for life was seen as critical to preserving both the Public Service’s effectiveness, and its integrity. It was also a way of avoiding paying workers in the state sector wages and salaries well below the “going rate” in the private sector. The state’s guarantee of permanence – job security – was an important part of retaining its workers’ loyalty, and preserving their bureaucratic effectiveness.
Even in the depths of the Great Depression, it was considered more prudent to apply an across-the-board reduction in public servants’ wages and salaries than it was to engage in mass lay-offs. When the right-wing Coalition Government of 1932 announced a 10% cut in Postal and Telegraph workers’ wages, their protest meeting in the Auckland Town Hall, from which the unemployed were excluded (the venue being full-to-overflowing) became the catalyst for the Queen Street Riot that shook conservative Auckland to its core.
How many of today’s public servants are aware of their own history? Judging by their reaction to the loss of so many of their colleagues’ jobs – not many. A more likely proposition is that a clear majority of them would regard the idea of a job for life as just another of those absurd practices thrown up by the protectionist regimes swept away by the reforming governments of the 1980s and 90s. For younger workers, in particular, impermanence of employment is a fact of life: a reflection of the economic “rationalism” to which all employees are subject; including public servants.
This tearing away of citizens from their nation’s past is the most important confirmation of the neoliberal ideology’s cult-like practices. Among the very first things that a cult seeks to do is engineer a complete break with the individual follower’s past. More than that, the cult leaders will go to extraordinary lengths to characterise everything that has come before as evil and destructive. The follower’s old reality is blamed for everything that has gone wrong with their lives; it has no redeeming features; and must be abandoned completely.
As anyone old enough to recall the transition from New Zealand’s formerly social-democratic society, to the market-driven neoliberal society ushered in by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson, will also remember the way in which everything that came before 1984 was cast in the worst possible light.
This neoliberal denigration of the past was nowhere more unrelenting than in its depiction of the public service. The Post Office and the Railways were held up as being both irremediably inefficient and scandalously over-manned. Playwright Roger Hall’s “Glide Time” caricatures were presented as accurate depictions of a public service that contributed nothing useful or worthwhile to the nation.
This invalidation of New Zealand’s past, operating relentlessly for forty years, has come at the price of growing cultural discontinuity. In the words of the distinguished American sociologist, Daniel Bell:
“Today, each new generation, starting off at the benchmarks attained by the adversary culture of its cultural parents, declares in sweeping fashion that the status quo represents backward conservatism or repression, so that, in a widening gyre, new and fresh assaults on the social structure are mounted.”
Compounding the culturally disintegrative effects of neoliberalism’s hatred of history, has been the parallel growth of the universities’ disparagement of Western culture in general. The extraordinary achievements of Western art, science, and politics have been reconfigured as expressions of White Supremacy. In a cultural pincer movement of remarkable social malignancy, the young Westerners of the early Twenty-First Century find themselves prevented from drawing anything but shame from the past, while moving into a future belonging to everyone but themselves.
The historical contrast presented by the current bureaucratic milieu, and that of the culture enveloping the public servants of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries is stark. Drawing immense pride from their past, and comfortable in the cultural certainties of their present, they confronted the future of their country with enviable confidence. Christian or atheist, New Zealand’s public servants’ determination to bring “God’s Own Country” ever closer to its maker was manifested in the impressive cultural, social and physical infrastructure they bequeathed to future generations. Built to serve Kiwis its creators would never meet, “Old” New Zealand’s infrastructure proved strong enough to withstand every challenge – except neoliberal hostility and neglect.
It is possible that the quietude of the 2024 Public Service: it’s apparent willingness to mount the scaffold without protest; is explicable not only in terms of its incapacity to draw strength from New Zealand’s past, but also on account of its lamentable failure to make the slightest impact on its present. Could it be persuaded that the charges levelled against public servants by the Coalition Government (and plenty of other New Zealanders besides!) are justified? Is the Public Service pleading “Guilty, as charged”.
After all, those public servants who had been given jobs for life seemed remarkably proficient at getting things done. They created an industrial relations system, an education system, a health system, and an accident compensation system, that ranked among the world’s finest. It designed and helped to construct a national network of roads and railways, as well as a hydro-electric power grid that made New Zealand a modern economy.
The public servants who rejected the very idea of jobs for life have very little to show for their market-inspired governance. Industrial relations in New Zealand would make America’s Nineteenth Century Robber Barons blush. Education and Health, post-1984, have steadily declined to their present parlous states. New Zealand’s rail network is a joke, and its roads are an obstacle course of potholes and plastic cones. The previous government, briefly seized by the future focus of its Labour predecessors, could not rely upon public servants to get its “transformative” plans off the ground. Labour’s successors – National, Act and NZ First – seem content to leave New Zealand’s future to their private-sector mates.
Impermanence, it would seem, is a guarantee of very little else but failure, and the inability to even envisage success. Denigrating the past has proved to be the most effective way of ensuring that the future never moves beyond the failures of the present. Disinheriting the owners of a culture, while demonising its creators, merely confirms Bell’s insight (following W. B. Yeats) that “in the widening gyre”, where “the falcon cannot hear the falconer”, the future will, indeed, belong to one “rough beast” after another.
*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.
48 Comments
The arrival of the concept of the SOE’s was in effect corporatisation of the public service in those departments as/where relative. Consequently the executive and staff saw and compared themselves as akin to their contemporaries in the private sector and thus the equivalent comportment and trappings were sought and claimed. The notion of being a dedicated lifelong servant of the people went out the window right there. Hence the motto of all authority, no responsibility came swiftly and handily to the fore. A more concise explanation of that transformation is illustrated in any local body council you might choose to consider in that the culture has evolved to the point that the ratepayer as the employer who provides the funds for the salaries is considered of little material importance. Said it before to say it again, a bureaucracy that is self serving, opinionated and unaccountable is a threat to society and democracy itself.
The arrival of SOEs also saw the final separation of ministerial responsibility & accountability from the state sector, that being delegated to the CEOs. Public servants claimed private sector "market rates" for their job, despite their legally protected monopoly.
"Fifty years ago, lay-offs in the thousands would have engendered a much more aggressive response from the state-sector unions. The bonds of solidarity were a lot stronger then than they are now." The current "lay-offs in their thousands" represent <6months of Labours irresponsibility & reckless poison pill recruitment in the runup to the election.
Labour increased the public service numbers ~18000, nearly 40% in 6 years in their efforts to stack the deck so as to continue their "long march through the institutions" - & achieved no significant improvements for NZ.
I recently went tramping in Fiordland with an Irish couple and an English man. They had all lived in NZ for a few years and were experienced NZ trampers. They were extremely positive about DOC, describing it as world class. They reported there was no equivalent organisation in the UK or Ireland and nothing in Europe was as good. Even worse because of the suing culture in Ireland rather than our ACC system building a publicly accessible wilderness track was not feasible.
NZ is hard on itself. We kind of have a nationwide tall poppy syndrome. We don't have the natural confidence of the Aussies for example. But some aspects of our culture and society are world class. And as Chris Trotter describes many of them are long standing - dating back before 1984.
We never stood a chance. Back in the eighties and nineties when poor working class people could suddenly borrow money for their discretionary purchases marked the beginning of the end. A very clever ploy from the neo-liberal/transfer public assets into private hands band forever transferred real power into those who controlled the credit stream. This continues to this day. On the back of this strategy you can twist society into a 2 income household where both mother and father have to work fulltime to ‘make ends meet’.
Now we have the situation where families are at the mercy of whatever profit taking/cost cutting measures their employer is currently undertaking. Take it or leave it mentality where the employee has no say in the matter. Any cursory view of the current indebtedness of most families will show them to be heavily in debt and forced to keep the cash flow from wages and salary going to avoid credit default and bankruptcy.
Yes the rogernomics dismantling of traditional restraints on the finance sector coupled with the emergence of and then huge upsurge of credit card usage created unprecedented reliance on debt full stop. In turn, and particularly those then entering the workforce and from thereon, folk have found it increasingly difficult and/ or unpalatable to distinguish between whether the money they are spending is earned or borrowed.
This is a yesterday's comment.
The era of growth, is over.
All that post-WW2 construct, was based on GROWTH. Trotter really is part of that era - he should catch up or move on, perhaps. The bigger System - the one predicated on GROWTH - is beginning to devour subservient ones, in an effort to stay alive. It won't work in the long term, nonetheless that's what is happening.
The past is not returning....
It's amazing PDF. Anything anyone says, left or right, is always wrong, and you are always right. The all knowing one that you are. Unless we are shrinking, we are losing. It is getting quite boring to be honest......and unfortunately for you, your socialist/communist interest in de-growth (which in affect is communism in disguise), is never going to happen. Maybe you could buy a little patch of land, with some people that talk just like you. You could grow mung beans together and say stupid things about de-growth to each other and just pretend.
I think there was a difference between the fifties and the eighties too. Though I wasn't born , I imagine in the fifties there was still a sense of growing the nation, by the eighties, there was indeed a sense of jobs for jobs sake in the railways and post office.i knew several people whose job wad to look busy, and some who openly boasted of getting away with doing little.
The shame was, that labour's force was not used to straighten the rails, upgrade the infrastructure, so rail could compete with road today, and we could take fast trains between cities.Preɓble actually went in with the idea of saving rail, but the unions and management put paid to that, they couldn't see the woods for the trees.
Public servants I know few today, and they definitely don't get away with doing nothing. Strict targets to be met, in the call centre's at least.
Yep. I wonder how much longer this trend will go for. There's a problem with trying to outsource to the lowest bidder. Saving costs to deliver the cheapest projects initially costs more to improve and maintain in the long term. Then we are left overpaying to upgrade or repair infrastructure later that wasn't built to the standard it should've been. That or we just have to rely and spend more on the decades old solution because the new one has been cancelled to "save costs". There's a real mentality of "we can't invest in anything for the long term benefit of the country because that would hurt my pockets now". I'm really curious to see how it plays out long-term but I'm also a little scared to find out.
Also cutting govt staff and outsourcing to consultants is always going to cost more for less or the same. At least it's not over bloated government agencies though! Phew.
We have almost reached rock bottom in New Zealand in terms of absolute uselessness. Take the Christchurch Cathedral for example. Original cost to fix (after we stuffed around and argued about it for ten years while the cost went up and up), was 108 million I believe. I would have thought that was a fixed cost. Now we are a few years in and the thing has not even progressed to a state where is is safe yet, and the estimate has blown out to 248 million ? Now I know in dear old NZ we can pay consultants that much to not build of fix anything (Auckland light rail project), but 248 million to fix a single story building is pathetic considering it was built originally pretty much by volunteers and given to the city. This is how far we have come, we cannot even complete work that was originally done for free without spending quarter of a billion dollars. Then we cannot build a couple of buildings and buy two ships without trying to spend 3 billion dollars, and we are so incompetent (thanks Labour) we are facing a $200 million penalty to cancel that contract.....so we don't have to spent 3 billion supporting a business that brings in 100 million bucks a year and makes hardly anything as a result of being so poorly run...
It was underinsured and in that fundamental failure, lay its fate. Consequently began an exercise of denial of reality and chasing and wasting other people’s money. At this point it is now the embarrassment that was inevitable. Best to stop any more wastage, demolish and see what the rocks and land can be sold for. Just an awful example of incompetent unaccountable dreamers holding too much sway for the city’s good.
I get that, there were a number involved. But the money was raised. The contractor is supposed to deliver. I cannot see how they can just add 150 million bucks to the total now they are half way through the project. Who produced such a shitty contract that allows these types of overruns.
& a few others...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChristChurch_Cathedral
Based on kiwikidsnz link
"At a meeting of the diocesan synod on 9 September 2017, Bishop Matthews announced that the synod had voted with a 55% majority that ChristChurch Cathedral would be reinstated.[64] She estimated that the project would be completed within 10 years. " 51% majority is useless in 99% of cases. 55% not much better. This type of decision 2/3 majority.
Not sure how labour are to blame for this. I think you should be pointing the finger at the inefficient private oligopolys we have it the building sector. The boats were a good deal, the buildings overly expensive. One would be made in NZ the other not.
There was a time we considered infrastructure key to operating as a society. Now nobody wants to pay for it. Whether it be ferries, roads or water.
All the elderly pensioners are now discovering if you vote down the government paying for three waters then you have pay for it through rates increases. I have never laughed so hard.
The ferries were what, 300-500 million or something. Not fit for purpose anyway. and had not been granted to operate in the sounds. 2.5 billion for a couple of shore based facilities is just ridiculous.
We were always going to have to pay for three waters (actually just lets just call it water infrastructure because three waters really brings back bad memories for many people). The reason you are going to have to pay is two fold. 1. Because the Clark Government allowed councils to run around and paint rainbows and spend on other pointless white elephant projects and wasted all your money on that rather than build important infrastructure. So, there is a gap there, as a result of utter incompetence. 2. We contract out the delivery of this infrastructure building to third parties that make massive margins (some are really useless and still manage to lose money even when over-charging - Fletcher Building (also good at lighting important infrastructure on fire too)).
So, yes, you will pay more rates to make up for the Labour induced infrastructure deficit (ironically they thought they were the answer but really they were the cause). But, the answer was never going to be to take assets away from councils and let third parties overseen by Iwi (that have no ownership in these assets other than their share as rate payers). That would have been a total disaster, particularly as they were not answerable to rate payers, and could borrow money, and if it all went tits up, the rate payers were on the hook for it.
Three Waters was a completely ridiculous idea and was rightly rejected by almost everyone. I know they made some changes as a result of the huge outcry, but there initial offer showed their true intentions, and the initiative was a dead duck from the beginning. Many councils around NZ are going to be just fine. Auckland and Christchurch, among others. Wellington is obviously toast. Their leadership is appalling and unless they vote accordingly when they get the chance, it will only get worse for them.
The proportion of Canadians being employed in the public sector continues to grown and took off from the Covid period. That proportion has increased a whopping 25% since 2020, while the proportion of self-employed hasn't gone anywhere. Entrepreneurship is dead.
https://thehub.ca/2024-04-11/livio-di-matteo-public-sector-employment-n…
I struggle that many in the workforce know more about quidditch than industrial relations, and any clue about rights of employees - the Employment Contracts Act worked a charm.
Incredible youtube New Statesman I could not paste the address, search - Blame for Britains sewerage crisis.
from 5.55 the truth comes out.
"....After all, those public servants who had been given jobs for life seemed remarkably proficient at getting things done......"
Yes. And they were far fewer then.
The core public service moved from getting stuff done, to supervising others who did things. And ensuring their own security by creating more rules and more complex rules.
I think you've come closest to getting it right. It seem the introduction of Rogernomics (Friedman's free market policies) in the 80's led to most government departments outsourcing what ever they could or otherwise creating independent business units. Before that there were workers and bosses in government service directly responsible for doing stuff (remember the Ministry of Works?). By today's standards efficiency really wasn't there, but any savings has been more than swallowed up by the excess Wellington drones.
Downer or Higgins might be more efficient at building roads or buildings, but they also make big profits too, while keeping most of their staff wages low. Not really a good outcome in the long term.
You write as if several thousand of these 'public servants' had not just been hustled into place with no great thought or planning by witless Jacinta. I expect that solid, intelligent, educated, life-time workers for the public good might continue. Hopefully its just the fly-by-nighters who need to reassess their reason for living
I had the joy of working in both the pre-neoliberal and post-neoliberal public service here in NZ.
In my 'pre' experience (admin-type role) the design of the forms we were filling out changed three times over my tenure. In my 'post' experience (managerial-type role), the location of the door to the floor's conference room changed three times over my tenure.
I think that hilariously points out the differences.
Seems to me that simultaneous to that let’s say organisational change there was too a cultural change, from one of a purpose to facilitate and provide services to one of intent to change the behaviour of the public. As, if for a suit of clothes, changing the body to suit the tailor.
Pretty incoherent article… the woke movement is mainly driven by educated elites that seek to wield “I know best” power over the proletariat…that and the fact lefties require victimhood mentality else cease to exist.
The only reason the public sector are not putting up a fight is because the evidence of their (1) untenable headcount (2) extreme cost of service (3) and poor quality of service is so bad they can’t submit a defence.
….and the fact that the sackings so far only represent half of the increase in headcount in the last three months of the last hopeless government….so it’s only the newbies that have been in their jobs for the last three months getting the chop so far. Once they get stuck in and the count is over 10,000 we should hear some complaining. But you’re right, even after 10,000 or so cut there is still no reason to complain. Their outcomes are useless and they know it. Imagine a job where all you do is manage meetings to manage meetings, and there are probably 1000s of them doing exactly that.
Would put it in the category of a correction myself. The aberration being the unbridled recruitment throughout the tenure of the 6th Labour government and especially compounded after the 2023 election. Since when has return to normalcy and/or realism been the considered to be slashing. Some areas of the media seem to be outraged as if co-victims, they believes that redundancy and job cuts should only apply to other vocations.
It’s not slashing, I agree. 10-15 thousand removed from the public service is right sizing. It should never have got this high. I do feel sorry for those that have to go but their jobs are made up jobs supporting other made up jobs. Incremental growth is fair enough, but from 2017-2023 it was completely out of control with worse performance in the end.
There appears a misunderstanding of what the 'public service' does.
It is (or was) more (much) than guys leaning on shovels, pushing of papers or a glide time job for life....it was the states ability to engage with private enterprise on an (at least)equal level of expertise, a daily engagement with the market and the consequent ability for the state to deliver.
We abandoned a lot when we allowed dubious short term cost savings (and fire sale prices) to prevail as we now daily witness.
Not CT's finest
there are still plenty of "permanent" or certainly career civil servants but it has been some of these very same civil servants who have invalidated their own actions and attempted to remake NZ as they see it should be - a socialist co-governed paradise with themselves in charge.
Its Animal Farm and they think they are in charge -so to sacrifice a few of the workers while waiting for the next opportunity to create the new paradise is the price they are prepared to pay. To change the civil service into a service will actually need some of the old guard to go
Was 1984 necessary -definitely. Could it have been done better definitely -although many of the civil service resisted along the way -and going slowly would have been fatal - as it was David stopped for a cup of tea part way through
and giving the civil service kudos for the impressive social and cultural infrastructure may be CT's memory but NZ was considered a dull sleepy somewhat boring little mutton and potatoes, rugby racing and beer colony so the change from that certainly wasnt driven by our dynamic civil servants many of whom resisted all the way
The mega-rich look around at what to acquire next.
But everything is already owned by a member of their brethren.
But it is not so.
The Public own a huge swath of desirable things.
Things of great beauty.
Things that could be producing a king's ransom every year.
How can they acquire them?
How can they pay as little as possible for them?
They consult the great vampire squid.
The answer is simple.
They need only convince half the owners that the current guardians are weak and corrupt, and the Things will be gifted to them.
The current guardians (last year) were not weak and corrupt, they were weak and corrupt and stupid as well. There is no evidence that the correct lot are selling things to their mates, that is just wishful thinking on your part. Last year Labour got routed, and everyone was saying what poor job National did of campaigning. Therefore it seems they didn’t even need to do much convincing. Labour simply collapsed under the weight of the problems they created for themselves and handed the current lot the mess to clean up. Which they will despite the complaining (which should now cease since the left wing media are going broke)….
From listening to Nicola Willis on RNZ this morning, it seems the government is going to have to examine and supervise the reduction in public service costs, to assure that the management class isn't immune to job losses.
Given the hiring spree of late last year, the loss of 2000 public service jobs will reduce the size the the public service to what it was in Q3 of 2023.
Information like that is, I think, tempering people's sympathy and fuelling anger about what reads as cynical turf protection by management hired under the watch of governments of all stripes who don't get that the market doesn't function when you have mandated monopolies: the idea of a public service, dies.
That average $50k per redundancy looks like it's because older public servants are taking the golden parachute that their old-school employment agreement gave them. If that's the case, institutions like MBIE are losing their most experienced staff (actual public servants in the old meaning of the word) with deep institutional knowledge. The people who are left behind are the transactional types that Trotter was talking about.
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