Has the public service got too big for its boots?

David Wilson has job-hopped within the public service since he launched his career as a select committee clerk at Parliament a decade ago.

As the bureaucrat has risen through the ranks, earning more money with each promotion, Wilson has no plans to take his skills as a senior policy and research manager to the private sector. Now working at the Office of Film and Literature Classification, he earns a comparable salary and works as hard as friends in the corporate sector.

While National isn't eyeing his office in particular, the party is heading into the election claiming the public service needs to be trimmed back to help pay for promised tax cuts if elected to Government. Treasury has already attacked the rising wage bill of civil servants under Labour, which over five years has cost between $750 million and $1 billion extra in each Budget.

Under Labour, 42 departments and agencies now employ almost 25 per cent more civil servants than they did four years ago. In 2000, 30,040 people worked in the core public service; by last September, that number had risen to 38,270.

National's finance spokesman, John Key, points to the Tertiary Education Commission, a tertiary funding and policy agency where staff numbers have risen from 191 to 341 over the past five years.

Says Key: "Education has built up a significant number of people in its bureaucracy. And even so, they've overseen debacles, everything from sing-along songs to the Wananga ...

"The Government ... has been very liberal in its hiring policies and programmes. That has led to some fat in the system that I believe should be trimmed. I don't think it's fair for New Zealand taxpayers and their families to pay for the excesses of Wellington."

But ask Wilson and he doesn't see any evidence of blubber. He has noticed, though, that wages have increased. A new graduate used to earn about $24,000 when starting out, and that has risen to about $34,000. However, public sector pay rates still lag about 4 per cent behind the private sector.

Says Wilson: "Politicians are given enormous responsibility and vast money and they're expected by the public to spend that wisely. The only way to have good quality advice is to provide people to make those decisions for you."

After more than 15 years of public sector restructuring and staff and budget freezes, Labour - which started the reforms - has spent two political terms rebuilding its bureaucracy. Prime Minister Helen Clark proudly told a conference a year ago that one in five jobs in the economy were now filled by people working in local and central Government.

But Key says the additional 8000-odd state servants are creating more work and they're more costly to accommodate and fund. The number of health bureaucrats has risen from 444 to 1085 in four years, due to the creation of district health boards and primary health organisations.

"There is far too much money going into programme building in the core sector, and not into front-line delivery. They've been on a hiring binge - a feeding frenzy built off the high tax take. New Zealanders should be able to choose to have more money in their pockets, or demand Wellington to operate with the same discipline as they have to do."

And it is not only the wages bill that taxpayers foot. In July last year, the Government introduced a new superannuation scheme for public servants that will subsidise their retirement savings by up to 6 per cent of their salaries each year.

The scheme was initially forecast to cost $32 million this year alone, but in November, State Services Minister Trevor Mallard admitted the uptake had been higher than expected, with 45 per cent of eligible employees joining.

At Victoria University, Richard Norman, a senior lecturer in the management school, argues that most of the staff increases are justified. Rebuilding the government sector is a good and necessary move, he says.

"Part of the staff growth has occurred because Labour has brought agencies that used to be outside the core sector back into the fold again, reuniting the Special Education Service with the Ministry of Education, for example. How can one feasibly claim that the SES is delivering a bloated bureaucracy? It's easy game for politicians, but they need to define what they mean by bloated."

Mallard says about 1800 of the 3128 education staff are not bureaucrats, but speech and language therapists, psychologists and other specialists working with children with special needs. It's a similar story in other departments where there has been growth, he says. For example, more staff were needed to implement new border and biosecurity policies after the September 11 terrorist attacks; some of the staff at the Tertiary Education Commission are administering nearly 9000 new apprenticeships and overseeing a new performance-based research fund.

"We also have a policy of hiring public servants rather than contractors. The previous Government fired a lot of public servants and many were rehired as contractors after being paid redundancy. It's our view that you need a set of skills in the public service rather than paying someone 1.5 times more as a contractor."

Public servants on Victoria University's post-graduate courses seem happier than they were in the 90s, according to Norman.

"Morale seems to be better. When your baseline funding is squeezed, that's very damaging to morale. If you get no funding increases over the years, that led people to think they had no future in those public organisations. There has been a catch-up."

He also blames Opposition MPs for stirring up more debate.

A report last September found that the number of public relations and communications staff had surged by 48 per cent since Labour came to power in 1999, creating a Government PR army of about 330 staff, including 33 Beehive press secretaries.

One of the reasons is the amount of controversy that is coming into public debate, such as health and education, says Norman.

"MMP has added to this. Politicians in a party like Act know they're unlikely to be a cabinet minister so they've got nothing to lose by creating controversies ... "

At the Corrections Department, there has been a 20 per cent surge in staff, up from 3819 in 2000 to 4620 in 2004, bumping up the wage bill by about 25 per cent.

Strategic services general manager Mike Martelli says there are more prisoners - up 26 per cent - which explains the increase in front-line staff in prisons and in the community probation service.

However, Massey University management lecturer Pat Kelly thinks this bureaucracy has got out of control. Last year, figures showed the number of policy analysts had increased by 30 per cent in three years.

"I'm sensitive to the number of my students who want to be policy analysts. They've become hard to come by and they earn good money. Some of them earn $65,000. That's my salary, and that's pretty good for a graduate student."

Also a Palmerston North city councillor, Kelly thinks taxpayers want more doctors and nurses at the coalface, not bureaucrats and advisers and analysts.

Mallard says a public service shake-up would be costly and destructive. The country would lose expertise that has been built up over the past few years.

"Some of our very good public servants have left. Every time you do a restructuring, there's a loss of morale, and staff focus on restructuring rather than on the job such as evaluating new ways of teaching reading."

- Herald on Sunday