PSA Media Release

16 Feb 2012

For Immediate Use

Cut the spin and look at the crisis on the ground

It’s time the Government stopped fooling the public over its running down of public services, says the PSA.

“Running workers and services into the ground is not ‘value for money’ as Bill English put it in his Budget policy statement today,” says PSA National Secretary Richard Wagstaff.

“All the talk of ‘innovation’, ‘better public services’ and ‘efficiency savings’ is nothing more than a smokescreen for privatisation, contracting out and more cuts to the public services that New Zealanders expect and rely on and that to some are essential.

“When the Government says it’s continuing to ‘challenge’ government departments to deliver ‘efficiency savings and innovations in service delivery’, what’s really happening is agencies are not doing more with less; they are doing less with less. You don’t innovate or find new ways to do things with shrinking budgets, you simply survive.

Just today, the Chief Ombudsman, Beverley Wakem, is quoted in the New Zealand Herald as saying her office is “starving” for lack of funds and that staff are being “worked to death”.

The health sector is also starving. A CTU report last year estimated it needed $127 million more just to stand still. Yet the Government continues with its myopic focus on key health targets, which in reality are only met at the expense of other needs.

“According to the Government, agencies are finding new ways to provide services. Do they mean agencies like IRD or DOC, which are being forced to pull capacity out of the regions and in DOC’s case rely more heavily on volunteers?

“If this Government was committed to providing better public services to New Zealanders it wouldn’t have slashed its own revenue flow with tax cuts that benefitted the wealthiest members of society most. It clearly doesn’t want better public services; it doesn’t care enough about public services or those who rely on them to commit to such a goal,” says Richard Wagstaff.

ENDS

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