Change should not be confused with progress. Any employee who has gone through a company restructuring exercise knows that.
Most workers have a story about the bright spark in management who pulls various parts of a company apart seeking greater efficiencies only for the next boss to take the helm and put them back together again. The result is plenty of upheaval and little gain.
I wonder if the latest state sector reforms might end up being a little bit like that.
Now, I agree with several of the arguments put forward for reform. The state sector ballooned under Labour and at some points it grew well above the rate of economic growth. You don't have to have a doctorate in economics or mathematics to conclude that it is simply not sustainable.
It is unfair for unnecessary jobs to exist in the public sector because it is taxpayers who pay for them. It is not productive either because in some cases a bloated public sector can crowd out private enterprise.
So I think John Key's government is absolutely right to seek efficiencies in the state sector and, in some cases, to tell departments and agencies that they will have to live within their current budgets for quite some time.
I do, however, question the wisdom of the government's strategy based on what we know so far: Merging the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology with the Foundation for Research, and Technology; putting the National Library and Archives New Zealand within the Department of Internal Affairs and placing the Food Safety Authority back within the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.
The Food Safety Authority was set up within MAF in 2002 and then separated in 2007 into a stand alone agency. So we put it back together again and that's progress?
In the science sector the Ministry and the foundation were created in 1990. The Ministry provides the policy advice and the foundation allocates the funding. The idea behind the separation is that there should be a natural tension between those two arms of the sector - if the same agency both provides the funding and monitors the quality of that spending there is a conflict of interest.
I look forward to this problem being pointed out when the newly merged science entity is reviewed in the years to come. In time, it will doubtless be pulled apart again by a Minister who shares the thinking that led to the 1990 model.
I am also unconvinced at the wisdom of placing the National Library and Archives New Zealand within the Department of Internal Affairs. Archives New Zealand is the official guardian of our public archives. The National Library is a "leading cultural institution ... tasked with protecting and preserving this country's taonga and enriching the cultural and economic life of New Zealand," according to its Minister, Nathan Guy. Its reward for that prestigious position? It gets shoved in with Internal Affairs, a clunking, amorphous, morass of a department, responsible for everything from births, deaths and marriages to internet safety, citizenship applications, lottery grants and gambling.
And you guessed it, the National Archive used to be part of Internal Affairs until the year 2000. Labour MP Grant Robertson, MP for Wellington Central, reminded me on Tuesday that his party separated Archives out because the chief archivist needs to be able to enforce the law that requires government agencies to keep and deposit their records. That's actually a pretty important role in a strong and open democracy.
Maybe the National government has a much more sophisticated plan afoot but I can't see how these state sector reforms are going to achieve much at all.
If it's savings we're after - kill off the needless agencies all together. First for the chop in my opinion should be the Families Commission. There's $8 million a year in savings in one hit. But no, that can't be done. Not because of the commission's invaluable research but because of National's deal with United Future leader Peter Dunne.
When Dunne goes, I guess the commission will end up going too. That is, until some future government does a coalition deal with a "family friendly" party which needs a policy trophy to show its supporters. Then the commission will be brought back again. Then we're back where we started at the beginning of this post: Change should not be confused with progress.
Read more of Guyon Espiner's blogs.
