More or Less

John Key's recent slagging of "bureaucrats", "navel-gazers"* and "paper shufflers" has got me thinking about the stark decision facing NZ voters later this year. It is not a choice I particularly like, but it seems no amount of banging my head against the wall will change the reality that either National or Labour will form the basis of our next government.

On the issue of the size of the public service, the National leader, and ostensible Prime Minister in Waiting**, has been quick to point out his party wants to cap the number of public servants, not cut it. However even if a growing population would not need a larger public service to support it, National has made mutterings about promising more police and defence personnel which would surely mean cuts elsewhere to balance it all out.

In my experience of dealing with employers, when someone says they want to cap the number of staff they also mean that they want to reduce their workforce by attrition, i.e. not replacing those who leave. If National do intend to do that as well then they will be able to radically reduce the number of social workers, school principals and Plunket nurses in quite short order.

Put simply the whole shebang comes down to this:

You cannot deliver significantly more with significantly less.

As Idiot/Savant puts it, "given that few people are satisfied with the present state of our public services (and the Opposition certainly isn't), cutting taxes at the expense of those services seems to be a very counterproductive idea." And The Standard has chipped in with their calculations of what size tax cut could actually be delivered by the quantum of "savings" the Nats have been talking about: an astounding 50c a week!

National have not yet released much in the way of policy, but we can examine the more general statements Key and his bretheren have been making in the media. Their overall themes are clear:

• National stand for less Government spending (otherwise how will they fund their tax cuts?)


• National stand for fewer public servants (see Anjum Rahman's post for an interesting discussion of who the Tories might be looking to cut).


• National stand for less public provision of services (meaning more private provision from our own pockets to meet the shortfall surely?)

There is simply no way that Key can honestly say that National will deliver more than those seeking re-election as our government in November. If New Zealanders vote at the ballot box to have less government provision then that is democracy, but I fear that National will only talk about their policies to accentuate the more and eliminate any specific mentions of the inevitable less.



* Not "naval-gazers" of course. I suspect National would want to fund a few more of them, to show their staunchiness on defence?

** Isn't that Phil Goff? /jest