An administrative revolution
Danyl Mclauchlan writes:
Where IS all the money going? In the past few months the government has created a new anti-terror research centre, committed $300 million to replace the school decile rating system with an equity number, created a new ministry for disabled people, a new national health provider, a new health authority for Māori, a new ambassadorship for Pacific gender equality, a new supermarket watchdog. It’s hard at work creating a new mega-sized public media entity – estimated cost $350 million – and establishing four new regional wastewater entities at an estimated cost of $296 million (the total three waters reform is priced at about $2 billion). It has purchased Kiwibank for $2.1 billion.
Some or all of these might turn out to be worthy enterprises but there’s a huge assumption in this government and on the left more broadly that they can only be Good Things – that questioning the rapid expansion of the administrative state can only be right-wing hate speech, part of a covert neoliberal plot to gut health, education, welfare.
Aren’t we seeing an erosion in state capacity alongside all this centralisation and expansion? Aren’t outcomes in health, education and welfare trending down rather than up? What’s going on? You can’t have effective public services without bureaucracies, but it’s not clear that the torrents of money flowing into them are delivering more value to the public or to the marginalised communities some of them are named after. It’s almost as if the primary role of the administrative state is shifting from serving the people to the redistribution of wealth to the staffers, lawyers, PR companies, managers and consultancy firms that work in them, or for them. A billion dollars a year in public sector consultancy is an awful lot of money when you’re running out of teachers and nurses because you don’t pay them enough, and the fire trucks are breaking down.
The contractors and consultants have never had it better.
In 2019 the government unveiled its Road to Zero campaign. This approach to road safety, funded at $3 billion over the next three years, “adopts a vision of a New Zealand where no one is killed or seriously injured in road crashes”, which it pretends it will realise by 2050, and which is accompanied by a $15 million advertising campaign (including the famous $30,000 in illuminated zero signs). The transport agency delivering the campaign, Waka Kotahi, has seen a dramatic increase in staff, especially comms staff. NewsHub reported it has “more than doubled its PR team since 2017 – when Labour took power – from 32 staffers to 88, 65 of whom are earning $100,000 or more.” It has more managers, more HR administrators, more accountants. It spent $25 million refitting its offices. But road deaths are trending up even though petrol is more expensive so commuter miles are down. RNZ reported that Waka Kotahi have only installed a fifth of the median barriers they were supposed to, and fewer than a fifth of the side barriers.
More median barriers, less PR!