Armstrong on public sector restructuring

John Armstrong looks at what National is doing:

You won’t hear National saying as much. But the minority Government has quietly begun what in the end might be the biggest shake-up of the core public service since the 1980s.

It has taken a while for this to sink in to those in Wellington.

The latest upheaval will be less visible than National’s previous attempts to pare back the State – deliberately so in order to blunt attacks from Labour and the public sector unions.

It is less driven by ideology and more by John Key’s view that public services are always comparatively high-cost operations and therefore should not be immune from being made to re-invent themselves as selling smarter, better services.

Indeed, the Government should not be immune from the same restraint the rest of the country is.