Two stories show the maelstrom of war occurring between the democratic forces of change vs the self serving Public Service.
There is a war of reform that is being waged in the high Towers of Mordor, a Game of Thrones battle for supremacy but with more violence and incest. The Wellington Bureaucratic Elite vs Corporate Greed vs a cautiously radical Government using consultants to beat back the Professional Managerial Class with private mercenary Professional Managerial Class.
The democratic forces of change are forced to spend a Billion on consultants to fight the self serving Public Service…
$1bn spend on consultants each year
“Labour’s spending on contractors and consultants has climbed to nearly $1bn a year, despite Labour coming to power suggesting that they would rein in this use of the private sector. Much of this is spent on the “Big Four” contractor firms – Deloitte, PwC, KPMG and Ernst and Young.”
…in response the self serving Public Service have massively expanded their Comms teams to ensure the media narrative is one they want with the messages and values they are pushing which is mostly self serving propaganda …
“…when Labour came to power there were 339 communications staff working in public sector agencies. By 2021 this has climbed nearly 50% to 497. Similarly, the budget for government “spin”, had gone up from $33.8m in 2017 to $55.3m in 2021.”
…this use of consultants to challenge the Wellington Bureaucratic Elite doesn’t reform, it empowers the private corporations as Comrade Ian Powell has highlighted with devastating insight…
GUEST BLOG: Ian Powell – Developing the New Zealand Health Plan – by elitist desktop analysis?
…unfortunately the solutions Labour are using seem to benefit the corporations rather than reforming the self serving Public Service.
Rather than spend money on services that directly lift the material well being of Kiwis, the political Government is at war with its Bureaucratic Elite.
On some fronts like the removal of oversight of Oranga Tamariki so that the State is less accountable for abuse, the State is winning.
On Health the corporations are winning.
On mass surveillance of the domestic intelligence apparatus, the Eye of Mordor is
Meanwhile the planet burns and the people are hungry.
The only way you can force the Wellington Bureaucratic Elite to adopt and implement policy is to ram it through in the first 100 days and then defend those gains for the next 2 and a half years. You can’t unpick those Bureaucratic Elite interests, but you can force radical change by recognising them as the problem upfront.
The truth is that we need a vast injection of capacity into vital economic sovereignty and we require a vast increase of capacity in our health, education and welfare infrastructure.
You can’t point at the problems without solutions.
You can’t spend more money if you don’t have new sources of revenue.
A Financial Transaction Tax would penalise the banks and the speculators so much so that you could lower GST and remove it altogether off food and vegetables.
A windfall tax on bank profits, a vice tax on the profit margins of the gambling, booze and nicotine industries, a sugar tax on big sugar, a journalism tax on Google and Facebook – why is it that the industry’s that are most addictive and damaging get to make obscene profit margins while the tax they do pay never covers the social cost of their products?
Why is that?
True democratic capitalism manages that capitalism with effective regulation, it doesn’t do -as we have done – and just let the market decide how best it’s going to rob us!
Rather than regulate this economy properly and force the corporates to pay more so that the societal infrastructure can be paid for, we have a propaganda war waged by the Government against its own Bureaucracy over vested interests.
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Wasn’t James Shaw the Climate Change Minister one of those consultants in a past life. So it’s probably hard for him to reform his mate’s.
More “insider” bullshit isn’t what’s needed now.. Actual conversation about the way forward is.. Try to remember that next time you are tempted to show your colonial descendent upbringing..
sack all the people who have experience and institutional knowledge and replace them with consultants at 10times the rate….privatisation reduces costs again….HUZZAH
The cruise ship “Democracy” is leaving port. All aboard are victims of neo-liberalism and the elite Professional Managerial Class. The passengers regret that they gave so much and then had so much taken away.
For 18 years I worked for a Local Body, leaving 15 months ago. In that time the reach of Central govt. into Local govt. increased and we were increasingly programmed into group think.
The developing negative aspects were many; e.g. the lack of management engagement and awareness with work happening out there, wasteful spending on projects that never had a proper evaluation of the project in the first place or an evaluation of the outcomes when completed.
Consultants were used to cover managers inadequacies to do with budgets and reporting. Or managers who had capable staff would get them to do numbers for them.
Our staff increased from 145 to 260 in 2 years and the HR dept. went from 2 to 5 and had a name change. Of course rates went up accordingly.
One CEO left under an unhappy cloud. As part of my job I saw his severance amount and heard him spout off at his retirement function how he was going to spend a little time doing things he wanted to do and later in the year would be looking for work.
After the GFC we were told to expect a 1% pay rise across the board. However the Executive team were paid 7%.
Also we had to listen to a manger just 5 minutes in the door explaining about the farm they still owned in another area, the expensive house they were looking at buying, the problem getting an au pair for the children and criticising a local school as being quite brown.
These elite managers are really something else because they are so unaware of their privileged lives and how different it is for others.
Unfortunately our politicians are of the same ilk and with their elite unawareness we are in a battle to save our sanity, our desperate people and our democracy. It needs hauling back up from the people, to the people and for the people. Not dictated by MP numpties with zipped lips in cabinet being dominated by the Party hierarchy. Very representative.
It’s not for elite tosser politicians and managers to reorganise our lives in secrecy and tell us what we can see, hear, say and do unless it’s unlawful.
Oh wait, hate speech laws.
And good luck with your 100 days project Martyn. It’s a great idea but the flames and ashes of Labour will have no chance to implement it, even if they wanted to.
Perhaps we need MPs to be able to choose a team for a year, which will then met with a team in the private sector. This means that all do not have to be delivered by mouth from mother bird, all chewed, and homogenous. And there will be a pool of members of the public who have knowledge of the particular area of interest and have a diploma in government planning, public requirements, planning and implementation.
The Sharma episode taught us that MPs are given training sessions (taught presumably by Parliamentary Services) on how not to “bully” bureacrats.
Surely political parties can select candidates who have some management experience, write policy based on their parties ideaology or pragmatism and order at implemented with the elite bureacrat leaders knowing they are down the road if they dont agree with or implement the party line. If an MP cant do that then why are they there? Dollars? Ego glory? CV leverage?
Don’t need to wait for Elections to sort out the top echelon “yes Minister” wankers in the state sector. Just methodically make them all reapply for their jobs…and replace them with left wingers who are into a re-nationalisation programme, ditching monetarist legislation, and retiring MSD/WINZ once and for all.
BUT there is of course a major flaw in my cunning plan–yes you clever TDB readers have spotted it. It was Labour that installed the State Sector Act, Reserve Bank Act, outsourcing, selling public assets, and basically supporting dog eat dog neo liberalism–which National supported and enhanced with the union busting ECA and Richardson MOAB. The Labour Caucus bar Mr Wood, actually support the state sector fifth columnists.
Labour IS the self-serving public service.
Congratulations everybody. Labour spending money on consultants and contractors is the party learning how to run the government “like a business”. I can assure all the corporate big wigs do exactly this. Supposed strategic visionary leaders, COO, CEO etc actually just get the company’s wallet out and pay some third party to come up with their direction. It’s endemic in larger businesses.
Labour is the most efficient government service ever. So efficient that they can bring down a concrete building with the energy of merely pushing a button. Everything in the way of old-fashioned manual work (ie done by man, or wo-man) is now automated and contracted out. Whoopee how modern.
There is a war of reform that is being waged in the high Towers of Mordor, a Game of Thrones battle for supremacy but with more violence and incest. The Wellington Bureaucratic Elite vs Corporate Greed vs a cautiously radical Government using consultants to beat back the Professional Managerial Class with private mercenary Professional Managerial Class.
We have lost the work for the rest of the prequel of the Hobbits to the UK. But me worry!
The above shows dramatic conflicts abound and we could build something akin to Spitting Images right here in hermit kingdom. We have the brains, can find the wherewithakl, tha smarts, the people. we have got it made. We can show the world in a microcosm our fucked up it is, and all have a laugh. Laughing is the best medicine the Readers Digest used to have a page for the jokes. And they should be laughing big too, if not they can laugh at us and pay for it. We have had some wonderful jokers, pray God they haven’t all snuffied it without ensuring their understudies are ready. And I suggested before a touring company with the latest parodies of Wellington, like mummers, or even patterers, who used to have a stand in the street and keep up a running stream of news and gossip. (Quick before Labour and the woke pass a law against it.)
https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-patterer-news-mongers-we-love.html
Not everything is about money. What sort of society is NZ creating? It’s not just the planet burning and some people are hungry but the amount of violence is now extreme and the police and government keep minimising it.
Wellington mum ‘at breaking point’ after 13yo daughter viciously attacked by same person for second time in six months.
“The 13-year-old now has a broken nose, fractured jaw, and black eye.
The person was known to Sarah’s daughter, even before the first attack in March. Sarah said she had no idea how dangerous they were until this latest incident.”
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2022/09/wellington-mum-at-breaking-point-after-13yo-daughter-viciously-attacked-by-same-person-for-second-time-in-six-months.html