March 18, 2009 11:00am by David Farrar

More dishonesty

No Right Turn is claiming that National has given an edict for 10% spending cuts across the board. I don’t know if he is deliberately misrepresenting the situation, or genunely does not know the difference between identifying potential savings/cuts and automatically cutting them.

The actual article he quotes, makes it clear the Government has not mandated 10% cuts:

The Government has denied having an overall target for cuts from its current “line-by-line” review, and the advice to public sector chiefs stops short of saying cuts of that magnitude will be made.

What the Government has said is:

Using your detailed knowledge of both the department and sector … can you identify the spending that delivers the lowest value for money, say, the bottom 5 per cent and 10 per cent.

To be honest this should happen every year, not just in a fiscal crisis. The scandal is that this never happened under Labour it seems.

This is not saying every programme in that bottom 5% or 10% will be cut. Iit is saying we want you to go through those programmes of the lowest value so we can then discuss which ones remain and which ones do not.

Anyone who has ever worked in the real world will have been through such an exercise themselves. Even non profits regularly do this – identify the lower priority programmes so a decision can be made on whether to do them or not.

If No Right Turn’s hysteria is correct, then every Government Department will have 10% less funding in the budget in May. I would be willing to bet that not a single Department will have 10% less funding. English has said that generally the cuts have been around 1% to 2%.

NRT also tries to keep repeating the lie that one has to cut this spending to pay for the tax cuts: