Mike's Minute: Is the public service sabotaging the govt?

My long-held suspicion, oft produced for the Prime Minister on Tuesdays, that the public service might well be working against the Government seems to have been laid bare in the Deloitte report into the failed health system. 

As you will be aware, we are going back to a board from a commissioner. 

But what the report seems to indicate is the board or commissioner is not the issue. The issue is incompetence. 

The fact a board was replaced is not about whether it’s a board. It's about the fact they never had control of the money, they didn’t have a plan, and they were hopeless. 

Hopelessness is hopelessness, no matter what the shape of it is structurally. 

More worryingly is the reportage that tells us that what they wanted wasn’t adhered to. It wasn’t listened to and it wasn’t acted on. 

In theory, a good governance structure would see this pushback and fix it. 

But you had incompetence and rejection dovetailing, with the end result being the chaos that has ensued. 

The report infers the Government would have been better sticking with 20 health boards. My argument was always in a country the size of New Zealand, four DHB's felt about right. 

A centralised system always had Soviet vibes about it, and then when your centralised system was overseen by buffoons, you got the result we did. 

Here's a critical line from the report - "the centre made requests, the district ignored them". 

That's sabotage. 

There were no supporting action plans, ownership, budget impacts, tracking, reporting, or governance. 

Health New Zealand did not have the right executive or board level controls. This is yet more Labour Party incompetency – all ideology, no delivery. 

By the time you add the Brian Roche report into the public service to this, surely we have a case that shows not only do we have a bloated structure of too many people, but many of those in that bloating are hopeless and/or undermining what is trying to be done. 

DOGE, anyone? 

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