Sufficient Leverage? Years of underfunding and down-scaling, and countless restructurings, have routinely wiped away decades of institutional memory. Grant Robertson's 2020 Budget has engaged the levers of government action - but do they still work?
THE FINANCE MINISTER would appear to have pulled hard on
every economic lever he could find. The 2020 Budget is breath-taking in the
sheer scale of its ambition. What we are all about to discover now, however, is
how many of those levers are still attached to machinery that works. Can the
Government’s orders be carried out, or, like Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker
in April 1945, is it urging forward armies that no longer exist?
Think about the early stages of the fightback against
Covid-19. How long it took for meaningful interventions against the virus to
kick in. In the minimum possible time, the Ministry of Health was required to reach
maximum effectiveness – and all from a standing start. Years of underfunding
and down-scaling; countless restructurings during which decades of
institutional memory had been routinely wiped away: all of these ideologically-inspired
weaknesses had to be overcome not in months and years – but in days and weeks.
They were, but the effort required from Ashley Bloomfield and his team to make
sure everything worked was nothing short of heroic.
If the entire population of the tiny Mediterranean island of
Malta could be awarded the George Cross for their stoicism and bravery under
relentless German bombing in 1942, then I cannot see why our entire health
service should not be similarly acknowledged in the next Honours List.
Now we shall see how well the other major ministries of the
state meet the economic challenges of Covid-19. Impelled by the same sense of
urgency; required to respond across a similar number of critical fronts; how
will they perform? Will the massive amounts of financial and practical
assistance that our failing businesses and vulnerable employees need arrive in
time? Will the strategies required to haul the New Zealand economy out of the deep
hole into which it has fallen be forthcoming? More importantly, will they –
like the Ministry of Health’s responses – be subjected to the same searching
examination and ruthless critique?
Frankly, I am sceptical of the chances of either of these
crucial objectives being achieved. In the key state ministries: Treasury, the
Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment; the Ministry of Social
Development, the Ministry of Primary Industry and the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and Trade, the record to date has been one of lethargy, procrastination
and imaginative failure. Certainly, all of them have been subjected to the same
spending cuts as the Ministry of Health (thankfully now remedied by Grant
Robertson’s Budget) but the malaise in these ministries goes much deeper than a
mere dearth of funds.
Since at least the fundamental reorganisation of the public
sector in the late 1980s, the record of every successful state-sector CEO has
demonstrated not how much he or she could make their ministry do, but how much
he or she could make it do without. Under New Zealand’s all-conquering
neoliberal ideology, the state is an institution whose ineffectiveness is
accepted a priori: the less there is of it, the more efficiently our
economy is predicted to perform. It was the far-right American ideologue,
Grover Norquist, who recommended shrinking the state to the point where it
could be drowned in a bathtub. For more than 30 years, New Zealand’s
state-sector’s CEO’s (and the Ministers they advise) have made it their
business to keep it on a crash diet.
The Ministers of the present government have learned to
their political cost just how weak the New Zealand state’s starvation diet has
left it. The unfortunate Phil Twyford tried pulling levers at Housing only to
discover that, methodically, under governments of every hue, the wires
connecting the political will to give New Zealanders affordable houses with the
bureaucratic machinery needed of get them built had been cut. No matter how
hard Twyford pulled Housing’s levers – nothing happened.
Yesterday, the Minister of Finance rolled out his blueprint
for Responding, Recovering and Rebuilding New Zealand’s crisis-stricken
economy. He is borrowing and spending billions to make it happen. Of necessity,
a very large part of the work that lies ahead will be undertaken by the state.
It is, however, far from certain that New Zealand’s core economic ministries
will rise to the Covid-19 challenge as effectively as its Health Ministry.
There is, you see, a huge difference between the action
mandated by science, and the inaction dictated by ideology.
This essay was originally published in The Otago
Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 May 2020.
9 comments:
There has been no restructuring of the health service since the very early 2000's, nearly 20 years ago. Same number of DHB's. Same management structures. Basically institutional stasis for nearly 20 years, virtually a whole generation.
"Since at least the fundamental reorganisation of the public sector in the late 1980s, the record of every successful state-sector CEO has demonstrated not how much he or she could make their ministry do, but how much he or she could make it do without. "
You never said a truer word. Never! Efficiency has trumped effectiveness for many, many years now.
Inaction may also be dictated by economic capacity, which ultimately limits also the creative capacity of borrowing.
To: Wayne Mapp.
Is the crafting of straw men a hobby of yours, Wayne?
My reference was not to DHBs but to the Ministry of Health - where constant internal restructuring has over many years severely eroded both morale and effectiveness.
It is our pure dumb luck that Dr Ashley Bloomfield - a medical professional - actually knew a great deal about public health. So many CEOs in the public service know next to nothing about the work they oversee. This is considered a good thing. Managers are deemed to be more effective when their work experience renders them impervious to "provider capture" - i.e. to taking advice from people who know of what they speak.
But then, you know all of this already - don't you Wayne?
Philosophically speaking, Jens, if it's not a universal experience then it's no better than a rock traveling for ever in space.
Corona virus has added a whole lot more to the economy and changing things with in public health and the economy that will echo for ever, and in my opinion for the better. A lot of which will depend on the precedents set during the 4 lock down phases and the legislation that will produce and it's resilience to be able to coup with nuclear war should that come.
Today though I want to mention something that happened in the early stages of the virus when woke social justice worriers mainly online denounced any and all responses to the virus as having racist and xenophobic under tones. Chris Trotter how ever reveals that he fully well knows that there is indeed issues with resource allocation with in DHBs. And in his comment above Wayne Mapp also reveals that he knows a whole lot more than he is letting on but maybe doesn't quite know everything thus changing a lot of right wing mythology because before this point it is never fully revealed how much anyone knows about mismanagement with in the DHBs.
And I know CEO's and DHB board members are not that dumb, I know they won't take things very far, as to be overtly racist I mean. All though I do know that power corrupts, that's not abnormal, that's very normal. First to Wayne Mapps relationship with the previous government and the problem I have with that is those attachments are going far far further than politics intended. This is interesting though where people should be compensated for there intellectual and physical labour where Wayne Mapp comes out and says he was fully aware of the relationship when he says and I quote:
"Same number of DHB's. Same management structures. Basically institutional stasis for nearly 20 years."
Although that statement is inconsequential it is a lesson for any Prime Minister that the turn anyone has to step on to fall into corruption and God forbid overt racism is the idea of disguising your attachments with good intentions and the pressures that that would put on management to comply with any Prime Ministers true intentions.
Hilarious! Why do you feel compelled to respond in similar vein to every one of these posts?
Brilliant and very timely Chris.
One could add that with Bloomfield's effective zeal, the only possible blind spot in Grant Robertson's budget (however fiscally and socially deemed essential) is that which the climate crisis and C19 have collectively shown up...
The time, IMHO, isn't to prop up flailing tourism, and many other neo liberal industries, it's the very time to rip those threads right out of the sad, sick old market forced garment.
It is time for real vision to reshape life itself, post Covid 19 into much better, more humane, meaningful and intelligent fabric.
GS at 9.56
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
Aldous Huxley
Biography
Author Profession: Novelist
Nationality: English
Born: July 26, 1894
Died: November 22, 1963
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/aldous_huxley_391055
(Second meaning of 'anarchy' on google:
'absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal'.)
The real danger of safetyism:
"By all means, let us defer to technocratic competence in times of emergency. The suspicion, however, is that the leadership of “public health” (as opposed to actual doctors and nurses) doesn’t, in fact, take its bearings from the apolitical ideal of technocratic competence. Rather, they appear as party cadres labouring on behalf of the regime of liberal internationalism. Theirs appears to be the worldview expressed by John Lennon in his infantile song ‘Imagine’, or by Immanuel Kant in Perpetual Peace."
"Political correctness, on the other hand, seems to be an effort to avoid the pollution that comes from noticing reality. This is certainly the safer course, for anyone whose professional life takes place in an institution. It is easiest to maintain this diligence against reality if one remains insulated from those ugly causal chains that unfold in the real world — perhaps as a result of one’s own diktats, if one is highly placed."
this episode of government by emergency has further whetted an appetite for control that has been blossoming among the Good People in the West. Two law professors now declare in The Atlantic that “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.”
"The pandemic has revealed a growing affinity between Western institutional players and the authoritarian Chinese regime. It is easy to forget that the CCP was once a highly ideological organisation. Today it is basically a crime syndicate that looks upon the norms of “the international community” the way the Sinaloa Cartel might look upon the Girl Scouts.
So the question is, will our ruling apparatus follow a similar trajectory as the pandemic gives them a taste of extended emergency power? At what point do the ceremonies of political correctness become a mere façade, a set of dogmas that nobody actually believes, but which make a useful instrument of social control?"
https://unherd.com/2020/05/the-hypocrisy-of-safetyism/
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