The Prime Minister expects Tuesday's pre-Budget announcement on the public service to be some of the most extensive and significant reforms agencies have seen in decades.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis is speaking this afternoon in Auckland and reportedly will lay out public service structural reform, technological uptake and headcount.
"What we're doing here is we're saying, look, the public service has been organised in a certain way over the last 30 to 40 years, it's right and appropriate we take a good look at that and say, could we better organise?" Christopher Luxon told reporters on Tuesday morning.
"The second thing is that there's an opportunity to really leverage technology, all with the primary goal of being able to deliver more effective public services and be much more efficient with taxpayers' dollars, and ultimately also building out a public service where the best and the very brightest actually want to come and work here..."
"We've got some very serious reforms that we've got to get underway. It's pretty exciting work," he said.
Luxon said he suspected there would be job losses - some through attrition and others "over a period of time".
"The public service is not a make-work function. It's not here just to maintain jobs and maintain a position of how it was always run since 1995 in the same way," he said.
Asked if it would be some of the most extensive and significant reforms to the public service in the next few decades, Luxon said, "I do and I think it’s long overdue".
"What's tended to happen is successive governments have come in and they've just added to what we already do, rather than... step back and ask the question, is this a cluster of activity that actually should be working more together?"
"Is there a need for us to have all these backroom functions when we could do that much more efficiently?"
He expected the plan to make savings, but added the primary objective was a more effective and efficient public service.
Labour public service spokesperson Camilla Belich said it seemed as though in the "last budget women paid for Nicola Willis's budget, and this time public servants and their families are going to be paying for the government's budget".
3 Comments
Ideological claptrap
When is someone going to overlay these fiddlings-at-the-margins, with reality:
https://axismundi001.substack.com/p/the-metabolic-theory-of-civilisation
These folk have come in too late, with no understanding. Perhaps we could examine that divergence, Interest.co?
I don't see why you need 100 policy analysts writing opinions to each other.
2-3 hard decision makers would be quicker and arguably make better decisions.
Also why develop 'policy' when there is negibible implementation skill.
So we are going to contract out the public service...likely to the tech bros.
More currency heading offshore.
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