Kerre Woodham: Should a Government be run like a widget factory?

First up, and this is something that I know is near and dear to all our hearts: ACT has vowed to crack down on the public services.

As they pointed out yesterday, Government spending has grown from $80.6 billion a year in 2017 to $137 billion in 2023. New Zealanders, including Labour voters, according to ACT’s polling, believe that public services are far worse now than they were a few years ago, and I think we’d agree with that, wouldn't we?

ACT says there's a growing disconnect between what the Government considers priorities and good performance, and the quality of services the public experiences. So, looking at the expensive and poorly thought out pet projects like restructuring the health or polytech systems, or the light rail, they are treated as goals in and of themselves.

Ministers are so focused on getting their pet projects through that they lose sight of whether it's actually going to improve New Zealander’s lives. And ACT says that the problem is that performance reporting of public services is haphazard. Measures can be cherry picked. Results can be reported in a way that isn't coherent, and it's difficult or nigh impossible to track trends over time. 

So you don't know whether a policy or a plan is delivering because they don't track it. And we've seen that. 

I've had interviews with public officials on this show who haven't had a clue how to measure the success of a policy that is costing you and I millions and millions of dollars a day.  

So really at first reading, doesn't this make sense? 

We've been demanding to know the results of so many of the ideologically driven projects that Labour has put in and they can't tell us. But for those who do work in business or have worked in the public sector, can a Government department, should a Government department be run like a widget factory? Is it even possible to do so?

There are so many competing priorities for our tax dollars right now, and over the next few years, that we simply cannot afford to throw good money after bad. I want to know if these projects are working. If they're not, we get rid of them, we try something else.

But are there any pitfalls in requiring the public service to perform professionally. 

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