Posts Tagged ‘Tim Groser’
NZ public sector – the arse protection racket (part 2)
More great quotes from Trade Minister Tim Groser’s 2007 speech on the craziness of government agency form ticking.
- “I would never have finally left the public service if my personal frustration levels with managerialism gone mad had not reached boiling point.”
- “I am not arguing for no compliance systems, no report backs; I am a huge believer in the role random audit plays in any governance structure. What I am talking about is the current manifest lack of balance between over-engineered control systems and trust.”
- A consultancy firm reporting on a department said: “As specialists in public sector organisations, we expect such organisations to be far more risk averse than private sector organisations. But the risk aversion we have discovered here borders on the pathological”.
- “Paradoxically, while the public service wilts under the burden of this compliance superstructure, never has true accountability been less. Somehow, no matter what the cock up is, no one is ever found responsible.”
- “I accept that caution is a reasonable attribute in a public servant – but only up to a point. We need some entrepreneurs in our health system, our schools, our foreign ministry. We need some lateral thinkers, some pathfinders. After over 30 years, I have reached the conclusion that the system is smothering inventiveness, has forgotten about the concept of trust and as a consequence the public is not being well served.”
- “…there is a lack of focus on doing what really matters and an obsession with process. Lip service may be paid to the Pareto principle – the idea that about 80% of outcomes are to be found in 20% of your work – but in practice huge energies are being spent on issues of second and third tier importance.”
- “The system is producing a mass of reporting of little value and sometimes which no-one in their right mind would read. This is why you hear so often from officials in key positions that they are hopelessly overworked. They often are. And frequently, they are working hard on things that simply don’t matter to New Zealanders.”
- “…this is underwriting a relentless drive for more resources which are being driven into areas of low quality spending and low productivity.
- “…paradoxically, given that we are drowning in compliance process, real accountability for performance has never been weaker – starting at the top, where final accountability belongs in a democracy. The public deserves better.”
As I say a great speech.
And till we get these issues fixed, we’re never going to get full value out of our public sector.
BigCake would be interested in hearing about any arse protection madness stories – anonymous tips to BigCakeNZ@gmail.com
NZ public sector – the arse protection racket
The public sector is not only too big, it’s too scared.
The ugly reality of work in a modern government agency is a depressing culture of ‘arse protection,’ paralysis by analysis,’ and running a mile from even the slightest risk.
Current Government plans to cut the size of the public sector ain’t going to do much to fix this, unless they are taking the knife to the all powerful audit teams which pretty much run the show.
No amount of removing backroom functions, avoiding duplication and pushing through mergers is going to make much difference.
It’s easy to blame the public servants for the way they behave, but it’s a rational response to the pressure they’re under from Government ministers not to ‘cock up’.
The infamous rule of any public sector activity is ‘How would this look on the front page of The Dominion Post?’. Lurking behind this rule is the unspoken question: ’How am I going to explain this to the Minister?’
Okay, sometimes public servants are so self absorbed they can’t even follow this simple rule, but it’s also a dumb self-defeating rule for a sector that accounts for more than a third New Zealand’s economy, employs nearly a quarter of a million people and comes with a wage bill of $18 billion.
Getting the public sector back down to an appropriate size is easy compared to fixing this issue which in the long run could be as damaging to our economic prospects as a bloated public service.
How many good public servant ideas have gone down the gurgler because of the risk attached to them. [BigCake would be interested in hearing about any of these – anonymous tips to BigCakeNZ@gmail.com]
Tim Groser, who knows a bit about the public service after a career in the public sector before becoming a minister, said in a great speech (when he was in Opposition) that there’s nothing in a public service cultural shakeup for politicians.
“…no political market,” as he put it.
“When it comes to policy failure, our journalists, at the policy wonk end of their profession, are more likely to be interested in the train wrecks…”
In the 2007 speech (NZ Public Service – Is this a case of managerialism gone mad?) Groser likens the “deeply risk averse culture” in the public sector to “close to a sickness.
“Some incredibly able people work – and always have worked – in our public sector.
“However, if you incentivise them wrongly, if the thing they care most about is not receiving a phone call on some utterly trivial matter from the Ninth Floor control police, you as a society will pay a price.”
Groser quotes Dr Dwayne Crombie who resigned from the Waitemata DHB with this parting shot:
“The amount of compliance and audit and monitoring is gobsmacking really. It’s become an industry in itself and a lot of the time I wonder if some of it is more about protecting people’s risks than really making a difference to whether people die in hospital….The health system is bogged down in too much strategy, policy and monitoring….”
Same for anyone else on the frontline in education, police, social welfare…
Groser sees it as an issue of trust, “or rather the complete lack of trust and its replacement with the culture of control. It represents a naïve belief that filling in a thousand boxes, filing a thousand useless reports, actually delivers real outcomes to the New Zealand people”.
Go for it Tim.
Looking forward to seeing action in this area. You had a word with the ninth floor control police?