Estimates Debate — Vote State Services

I am pleased to take this opportunity to ask a series of questions about what is going on in the State services portfolio. I have to say, though, that after having just listened to the Minister, in a different portfolio, run through what he knows about the energy situation in New Zealand, I am not greatly hopeful that we will get any particular elucidation in response to the questions I want to raise.

First, I say our observation is that many State servants in this country—in fact, thousands—do a superb job in assisting with the activities of the Government throughout New Zealand. There is no question about that. We take our hat off to the people who make services work, particularly those who are in the front-line services that we all come to rely on, such as education, health, the police, defence, and all the sorts of services that keep us safe and keep our community moving.

But we are perplexed by the rapid growth of the non-core bureaucracy in New Zealand. The rapid growth in the number of people inside Government departments is so great that the office space now taken up by bureaucrats in Wellington could be accommodated in no less than 25 rugby fields’ worth of office space. The bureaucracy has grown so fast here in the capital city that it has pushed property prices to all sorts of record levels. It is really interesting to see in these straitened times all sorts of deals being done on rents in large buildings all around the capital city, when those landlords who are lucky enough—and good luck to them—to have a State tenant are sitting there with a smile on their face, because the rather large rents they have been able to negotiate will continue to be paid at the expense of the taxpayer.

We have a number of questions that relate to that extraordinary growth. We make the observation that despite the fact that the State Service is filled with a lot of people who are very, very capable and competent, none the less it has what we would say is a large, redundant capacity, made up of those people who look after the Public Service Association, and who, despite claiming they are non-political, are the most political bunch that I have ever come across.

I ask the Minister in the chair, the Hon David Parker, whether he might go into some explanation of this matter. We see in the appropriation a little item noted as “Chief executive appointment and performance management services, advice on governance and performance of State Services, leading and reinforcing integrity and conduct, support to the Minister of State Services, and operational services to client departments.” Firstly, I would ask whether the Minister of State Services or any of his predecessors had to be taught lessons about integrity and conduct, because we might get an interesting response from the Minister. We have certainly seen in the last year an increasing politicisation of the Public Service, whereby many public servants have been put in the unenviable and somewhat compromised position of having to run the Government line on any particular issue. We have seen the difficulties that that caused, particularly in the Ministry for the Environment. So some assurance, I think, that the Minister himself understands the need for integrity in the conduct of the portfolio would be something that we would look to.

But we note that a figure of about $11.5 million is allocated just for that particular purpose—that is an awful lot of paper, a terrific amount of paper-shuffling, and, of course, a whole lot of people writing all sorts of reports and other such material. My colleague Phil Heatley mentioned before that all this Government ever does is to form committees, put together commissions, and have inquiries left, right, and centre. Well, it is no wonder, when that is one’s only answer in a policy sense to the things that matter in this country, that one ends up with such a very large, non-core bureaucracy.

The other interesting figure for us here is the Mainstream Supported Employment Programme. The estimates state: “This appropriation is limited to salary subsidy, training, and other support provided by the Mainstream Supported Employment Programme, which is a programme to assist people with disabilities to gain permanent employment in the State sector.” There is a very, very small figure for this programme, given the size of this vote—a $200 million vote—with just $3 million to be spent on this particular initiative. That seems to me to be very, very light. We have the Government spending money in other department’s programmes in order to encourage the private sector to give people a go, yet the Government itself is not following through on that.

Vote agreed to.

Vote Customs agreed to.

Vote Local Government