Labour didn’t think it would win 2017 and didn’t think think it would win a majority in 2020 so it had no plans whatsoever to reform the Neoliberal Public Service.
As the great Unionist Robert Reid points out…
…he’s right.
The Wellington Elite Bureaucrats run the Government, the politicians are merely the masquerade of Democracy so that you the voter are conned into participating.
The Wellington Elite Bureaucrats don’t give 2 shits about transformative change and will do all they can to implement neoliberal mantra over social policy.
Over the last 4 years, Labour have seen example after example of Bureaucrats misleading them to cover up their own incompetance.
From Corrections who lied about the prison riot, various assurances of border controls that weren’t implemented and purposeful stymieing of policy implementation.
The problem is the Wellington Elite Bureaucrats dent want to actually have to do anything and prefer to subcontract out all their obligations.
Labour are trying to overcome this with new delivery oversight, a vast upgrade of worker rights in the private sector to sideline the useless MBIE (while watering down PSA influence), a vast upgrade of the public health system so there are no more excuses and a vast as yet announced upgrade in state housing and welfare payments.
The 100k pay freeze is to help some of those Wellington Elite Bureaucrats understand they are no longer required thanks.
These are all great stop gap measures but Labour have to build the state sector up while amputating the neoliberal Wellington Elite Bureaucrats.
The next step must be a Ministry of Works who actually builds the state houses and infrastructure themselves rather than subcontracting it all out.
We want a state sector that does rather than manages.
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And yet Labour dump all over core government front line workers with their miserable 60k pay freeze, the very people trying to impliment policy, will lose their votes and lose the battle all the same. The same month as housing hit a new record high.
They couldn’t write a worse strategy if they tried.
Oh you are going to be bitterly disappointed when still nothing changes. Those same Wellington Elite are cheerleaders for this government and are drinking (craft beer) buddies and hang out at barbeques in summer.
…”The next step must be a Ministry of Works who actually builds the state houses and infrastructure themselves rather than subcontracting it all out.
We want a state sector that does rather than manages”…
—————–
BINGO !!!
I studied public service and also have a science degree. I am unemployed. The only thing my CV is lacking is references, a catch-22 to employment as you need work history to establish networks. Jacinda please go into bat for me like you do your bureaucratic community for hope and change, back me as a public servant trainee (I’ll work as a volunteer to start with) and support me into employment to grow this great nation. I want to be one of the heroes. I can pick rubbish up off the street if that is all that is available, an honorable job, I just need you to create a street clean company with your billions (the local council in my area uses impregnable tender contracts to dole out work, which they hold close to their chest).
The amount of civil servants was reduced under John Key of National in his first time, I believe. Has this number increased under Jacinda Ardern’s leadership? At any rate, we are in need of some of these beaurecrats for administrative purposes such as our continued response to the coronavirus pandemic, the increase in benefits to the unemployed and to negotiate some of these people into suitable employment, and to administer the slow but steady increase in social housing.
Most state servants are not bureaucrats, they are teachers, doctors, nurses, police and the like ,who are all capable of earning better incomes from overseas. A reduction in state servants or freezing salaries is far from constructive and will have a noticeable impact on the general public.
Unfortunately National’s nine years in government was disappointing, teachers effectively suffered nine years of an unofficial salary freeze. Where to from here, I have no idea, more of the same I guess.
The Lahour Party introduced the neoliberal counter-revolution in 1984. Douglas, Prebble and Co were ready for it. Why, because Labour has always been the party of the national bourgeoise, of national capitalism, and global capitalism demanded that NZ deregulate the economy and open up to world economy.
So it is not that Ardern was unprepared, or that Winston was a handicap, or that the bureaucracy has sabotaged Labour’s plans. After one term in office, and with a large majority, Labour can no longer use these as an excuse not to blast ahead with it plan if it has one.
No, these are threadbare excuses, Labour has no clothes. It has no plan to transform the economy. The most it will do is tinker with the trappings of the state, badger the Reserve Bank, push for a bigger role for Maori self-rule, fiddle with income policy, housing, education and health, in a disjointed, fragmented way. But none of this will stop the working class paying for the terminal crisis we are in.
Labour is all about appearance, not substance. Its all about performance. No more evident than its alignment with the Greens as the authoritarian liberal left enacting hate speech that offends peoples feelings, and sex self-ID, where sex becomes buying and selling the performance of identity politics.
Labour is now a Liberal party, and liberals have to reduce policy to compromises that end up serving those who have the economic power – the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. Nowhere is this as clear as Climate Change where policy posturing will not challenge the profits of the corporates or of the petty bourgeois landlords and small businesses.
The way forward for the working majority is not through the Labour Party or the CTU labour bureaucracy. The union bosses will push for the new labour law because it empowers them, not workers. That law will still express the original philosophy of the IC&A of 1894. That the state will pretend to stand above labour and capital and conciliate and arbitrate an outcome to ensure that wages will never threaten that profits bosses expropriate from wage labour.
Just as the Red Fed broke with the Arbitration Court in 1908 when it refused a wage increase, workers have to break with Labourism and statism once again. Many are already organised in direct action against coal and mining and the heavy hand of the state over our lives. We need more grass roots unionism like UTU which is not scared to confront the bosses where they live. We need to find a way to stop the road lobby and industrial agriculture from putting more Greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Capitalism is breaking down, and our lives are in jeopardy, the time to build workers councils in every town and city to debate and organise the way ahead has come.
“Labour didn’t think it would win 2017”
…..and had no concrete plans as a result. Their ‘policies’ were just a students union level wish list, none of which could be implemented in a practical sense.
Hence the ‘working groups’ and the abysmal failure to deliver anything of substance.
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