Government seeking value from public service

Last week the Prime Minister announced three changes to help sharpen the public sector's focus on providing better frontline services and getting better results.

These include setting a result-driven focus for the public sector and lowering the cap on core government administration employees.

Around Wanganui and South Taranaki, people tell me they care deeply about the quality of the public services they receive and what those services achieve.

Whether they're a farmer buying a new tractor, or a parent sending their kids to school, they want to know that they're getting the best possible goods or services.

If anything, it's even more important that the Government deliver high quality services, as the Government isn't just selling us a new tractor or a haircut - it is delivering fundamental services like health care, education, and public safety.

Those same people are also taxpayers. They pay the bills. They want to know that the public sector is spending money with the sort of care they would themselves.

Everybody wants value for money.

The 10 public sector goals, covering areas such as reducing long-term welfare dependency, boosting skills and employment, and cutting crime, will give a clear measure of how well the public sector, and the Government, is delivering on its promises.

We've also reset the cap on the number of full-time equivalent roles in core government administration at a lower level of no more than 36,475. We are already below that number and will stay under it.

There's a tension around how we perceive public servants out here in the provinces. The image the term conjures up is of a grey-clad, faceless army of bureaucrats, locked away in Wellington offices. Yet the reality is that many of those public servants live in our community, or in other provincial communities around the country - they work with us, their kids go to school with our kids, they are real people making a real difference to our communities. They are on our school boards, church councils, social and sports clubs.

It's too easy for departmental chieftains in Wellington to forget that when they centralise services out of the provinces, it leaves a real hole in the community. It also often ignores that the workers and infrastructure are already in place in the provinces - local people providing local services.

That's why the Government is not simply making cuts for the sake of making cuts - it's looking to deliver better services, make better use of the resources it has, just as any business should. That's why we're pushing the public service to make better use of technology, so the best services are enjoyed not just by central Auckland and Wellington, but by the entire country.

Taken together, these changes are a big shift - a shift towards better results that matter to New Zealanders, and delivering them within the tight financial constraints we all face.