Public service

That's all well and good in private, but in their public role, they're meant to be neutral and to apply what the government of the day is asking, again, whether on the right or the left, but they're not.

And, you know, again, it might be my political bias, Andrew, but next week, 10,000 public servants are going on strike all of a sudden they'd never do it under a labor government but they're more than happy to do it when the center writes in power um you have to be a long way of me saying you have to be quite skeptical around the political motivations of our supposedly neutral public service

and and perhaps um dictionaries for christmas all around what what uh public servant means uh and and well yeah okay i'll try not to get too cynical on this one It is an interesting competition.

Certainly, you know, don't want to get so cynical that we say, hey, what's the point on this one? Nothing changes.

The reason why we may not meet our potential was that the health status of the population was too poor to allow them to participate in the benefits of economic growth.

So the other half of the Greater Manchester story that that then triggered was the public service reform half.

Public services now need to be kind of configured in order to allow people to participate in the economy and achieve their potential and increase their life and family prospects.

Why on earth would you look at approaching public service from any other perspective than the population served and the place that you are trying to make more successful? I felt the arrival of new public management, and I didn't know it was the arrival of new public management, but it was explicitly taking the joy from that role.

Welcome to the Radical Reformers podcast.

I'm Andrew Laird.

But we're not here to talk about that, unfortunately.

We certainly could.

gutting not cutting the public service maybe maybe not so brian roche's secret preference isn't so secret anymore plus an mp reveals he's had to move house because of safety concerns Why? That sounds terrible.

Plus, Te Pāti Māori's tax plan, what does it say about what they value? You are with the Select Committee, Maxim Institute's politics podcast, and we are joined by our experts, Research Manager Mary-Anne Sperdle, Researcher Thomas Scrimgeour.

Scrimgeour, pardon me, I got it wrong.

Tell us about it.

Yeah, so

Brian Roche is the public service commissioner.

So essentially he's the kind of chief public servant responsible for public servants.

And what's happened is that under the Official Information Act, some correspondence with Brian Roche and some ministers has been about their plans to kind of restructure the public service.

City's attorneys, police, fire, CED, we just kind of have those in the middle.

And then we have a public services that has been 17.1, 13.5, and now we see a 19.1, which is kind of an elevated amount throughout all of those three years.

Public services remained comparatively low.

elevated those all three years and we're noticing a pattern with that one.

Something that I do want to highlight too is that police and fire were comparatively stable and even had slight improvement, which goes against everything that every other agency is saying.

Other areas wouldn't fill it absolutely like that point, but it could possibly and others could build the hurt that management services

had if it were to continue.

Public services, they also, we see a trend or a pattern here.

question.

The political right demonise debt because their project is to run down public services until privatisation looks like the solution.

Better debt facilitation means those assets can be extended and modernised.

Labour's plan, while allowing for over $130 billion in investment, still sticks to those debt protocols.

Is that going to be a problem for any new government forming?

Well, I think you're absolutely right that the project is to run down public services and then say, look...

We have no choice.

We have no option.