You don’t need a dollar sign to recognise satisfaction with public services, but you do need rigorous measures of those outcomes
Opinion: I am aware, when drawing attention to inefficiency issues and poor spending in places like the health sector, I can be seen to have an “anti-public sector” bias. Indeed contacts on the left often tell me so, bluntly.
Even a casual glance at media will confirm that most fire on these topics does come from commercial or political interests opposed to or at best suspicious of public-sector actions. But I make no apology.
Maybe my inclination to draw attention to a need to rectify public sector inefficiencies derives in part from some vestigial economics training. But that is not the essence of it. Rather a strong belief in the need to have efficient public services is to protect and promote those very services.
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This cause does not belong to those opposed to public services and they should not be allowed to be the ones framing and implementing such policies. Does anyone really believe the Act Party wants more public service efficiency to expand the range of services offered by public services? Other people, surely most of us, who think a core of publicly provided social services is a good idea, should be leading the charge for efficiency where they do exist.
A strong set of public health, education, housing and social support agencies is fundamental to any equitable and prosperous society. Such services do not have to be monolithic, they can and should have widely distributed power.
Decentralisation does not belong to the private sector (ever heard of monopolies or cartels?). Nor do they need to be nor should they be monocultural (our “public” is not monocultural nor should its service agencies be).
I recall the warehouse I visited on a wharf in Auckland when the Post Office was corporatised holding mail which had arrived by air but was 'maturing' – that is, waiting for the time to elapse to meet its surface mail description.
Such public agencies become less supported by the very public that owns them and who they serve for a variety of reasons which drive aggression against them:
* Interests opposed to public service get power and legislate them out of existence;
* Similar interests starve them of funding and limit their operations to handicap their effectiveness; and,
* They “leak” services to private providers because of their inefficiencies or ineffectiveness.
These often occur cumulatively.
Public services are not protected by being inefficient or by their supporters ignoring inefficiency. It is vital they are structured and lead in such ways that they are continuously seeking out better ways to deliver their service. Where they stagnate they simply expose themselves to the aggressions above.
I recall the warehouse I visited on a wharf in Auckland when the Post Office was corporatised holding mail which had arrived by air but was “maturing” – that is, waiting for the time to elapse to meet its surface mail description.
And the store in Wairarapa with many hundreds of steel desks ordered a long time before which would never be used.
Or much more recently, the large, empty leased office spaces around Auckland being paid out of the Health vote.
Public services may not think of themselves as competing but they are competing against currently or potentially similar private services, and other public funding for other services.
Nonetheless, though in different ways than in a fully competitive private market, they face options available to their funders and users. They adapt, lead, or fall prey to the aggressions.
This is not to say the same prescriptions on efficiency that pervade private corporations need apply. I see no reason why the public sector need not, and lots of reasons why they should, be leaders on the living wage, diversity, healthy work, etc. Efficiency is not identical to lowest cost.
The efficiency issues arise partly from the hierarchy, accountability, work practice and job specifications, which often affect activity levels negatively and partly from the way public services are framed for delivery (top down).
Especially in the area of personal services, efficiency arises from meeting (exceeding even!) user expectations. This can, in its own limited way, be guided by the rewards of dollars as in the private sector but that is not the only way and has its obvious faults.
In the public sector a relentless approach to be user-centric, to be community and whānau-driven, can just as easily meet the efficiency equation of resources used to outcomes delivered. You don’t need a dollar sign to recognise satisfaction. But you do need rigorous measures of those outcomes.
Those of us who really believe in the power of public service must insist on such an approach with all the rigour we can muster. It is the best defence and the best attack.
