Robertson Grant: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11683. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Deputy Leader—Labour):It is fantastic to be present in the Chamber and for Maggie Barry to break the habit of a lifetime and not go into petty politics. It is a moment that I will truly remember for many many years.Hon Member: It’ll only be a oncer I’m sure.GRANT ROBERTSON: It will never happen again that is right so I am delighted to have made my way to the Chamber to hear that beautiful moment.It is a pleasure to take a call on Part 3 of the State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill. As somebody who has been a public servant here in Wellington and who represents public servants as the MP for Wellington Central and also as a former spokesperson on State services I want to say there is a lot in this bill to be very happy about. This is a bill over which I know some concerns have been raised. They have been worked through in the Finance and Expenditure Committee. The idea the principles that lie behind this bill of trying to create a more responsive and more integrated State sector that can be more flexible and responsive to the needs of our communities is a goal that I do think is shared across the Parliament and I want to say from this side of the Chamber that there things in this bill that we genuinely believe will be very helpful to those overall principles.If we refer specifically to Part 3 of the State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill I want to make a couple of comments. The first of those is around the question of whole-of-Government directions. This is what is covered by clause 162 of the bill and in this case we are talking specifically about Crown entities and the ability of the Minister of State Services and the Minister of Finance to jointly direct Crown entities to support a whole-of-Government approach. This is a very good clause in my view because one of the things that anybody working both inside Government and also with Government agencies and Crown entities hears—the criticism that is so often directed at them—is that there is a silo mentality. All of us will have in our lives interacted with a Government agency that says quite simply “I cannot help you because that is not myresponsibility.” That is something that members of the public struggle to understand. Members of the public do not wake up in the morning and think: “Today I am going to deal with the Ministry of Social Development followed by Inland Revenue Department followed by another.”; they think about the Government. They think about the Government acting as a single entity. People who use the services of the Government and who interact and have to come up against those silos are frustrated. We need to be able to create a public sector and a wider State sector that actually meets the needs of those individuals and communities.But for politicians and as public servants there is a whole other level of frustration that is created. I can remember as a staff member in the Prime Minister’s office having to come up with creative ways of trying to get the public sector to work together. Anyone who was in the public sector in the first decade of the 2000s will quake with fear at the phrases “economic transformation” “families young and old” and “national identity”. I had three little boxes on my desk in the Prime Minister’s office with information on each of those and we did actually sit down and say: “How are we going to get the Public Service to work together on the priorities of the Government?”. It does not matter whether it is a National-led Government or a Labour-led Government. Whatever the Government’s priorities are how do we shift the ship of State to support the things that the Government wants to do?Hon Lianne Dalziel: By turbocharging the economy.GRANT ROBERTSON: For instance that may well be one of the phrases: turbocharging and finding a brighter future.Hon Lianne Dalziel: They haven’t switched on the engine yet.GRANT ROBERTSON: Well unfortunately I think that at this very moment the ship has run aground so that is not even a concern. But if we generalise it enabling the Government agencies to get out of the silos—we took that approach with those three themes—was what we chose to do. And we actually went as far as saying the Budget bids had to come through one of those three themes and they were consolidated. That actually cuts against the Public Finance Act and some of the amendments in this bill start to deal with the problem that was underlying that. The problem was that each Public Service chief executive through their statement of intent had set themselves up in an agreement with the Minister and that was it. They were the apex of everything. The amount of money that they could share between agencies was severely restricted severely limited and in many ways actively discouraged. So the fact that this bill is putting in place some mechanisms that will break up some of those silos is a very good thing.Dr Richard Norman who is an academic at Victoria University talks about the fact that the State Sector Act and the Public Finance Act written as they were in the late 1980s are products of a time that he says was the time of the spreadsheet. In other words it was all about rows and columns and if you added it all up at the end of the day you would come up with the answer that you needed. We now live as Richard Norman would say in the age of Google when it is actually all about the networks and the connections between issues rather than setting up artificial barriers. At the moment the structure of our State sector lives in the age of the spreadsheet and we do need to move it into the age of Google where we focus on the networks and we focus on the connections between the issues that face our communities. This bill—and in fact Part 3 in terms of Crown entities—does go some way towards doing that. The idea of whole-of-Government directions is a useful way of going about that but I would venture to suggest that actually we could go much further. We could go much further by saying what the problems are that we want the public sector and the State sector to address what the structures are that best address those problems and then work onthem that way. At the moment form is still leading function. If the State sector is going to deliver to the needs of New Zealanders function needs to get out in front. At the moment we still struggle with that inside the State sector. This bill does good things to move us in the direction of breaking down those silos but it fails in my view to go as far as it might.I want just in the time remaining to me to briefly talk a little bit about the question of statements of intent. I know that my colleague David Cunliffe was speaking about this at some length earlier on. All of us—former Ministers current Ministers and people who have been public servants—are aware that there is a danger in the statement of intent process that it simply becomes a box-ticking form-filling - type exercise. Again there are good things in this part—John Hayes: You’d certainly know about that—box-ticking and form-filling.GRANT ROBERTSON: John Hayes and I both worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and we know a good deal about form-filling and box-ticking. Actually Mr Hayes to his credit was never very interested in form-filling or box-ticking at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. As somebody who occasionally had to go around the Pacific in the wake of Mr Hayes I can say that he was much more focused on function than form—John Hayes: Outcome.GRANT ROBERTSON: —and outcomes at that point and that is to his credit. [Interruption ] That is right—no the wake was sometimes quite large and I am not referring to size at all here; I am just referring to the impact of Mr Hayes arriving in a community. But he was focused on the outcomes and I think the statement of intent does run the risk of being less about the outcomes and more about the process. I think there are some things in this part that do go to that. The note of caution that has already been raised is the fact that what the statement of intent process usefully does is open up to the rest of us what is going on and what the priorities are. If we can get that process—the development of those statements of intent—right then I think we will go a long way towards actually having a meaningful document.Again a big part of that is ensuring that the statement of intent when it is drafted and created takes into account the views of other relevant entities and agencies. We have all had that feedback about the 10 cars in the driveway. When you have got the family with the complex messy and difficult problems you arrive along and there are the 10 cars in the driveway from the 10 Government agencies. Does Child Youth and Family know what the police have done? Does the Ministry of Education know what Work and Income is doing?Hon Member: Or what the school’s doing.GRANT ROBERTSON: Or what the school is doing indeed. We all know that those are difficult problems but if we take that all the way back to the statements of intent of those agencies when the agencies are talking to one another on the creation of those documents and they are creating those documents on the basis of the issues and the outcomes that we want that is what will get us there. If we start at that point we will get a good outcome. If we start at the point of “Here is our formulaic statement of intent that we must produce on our own and we must look good about.” then we will not get anywhere.What I am saying here is that Part 3 of this bill I believe does offer us some positive ways forward for creating a more integrated and more responsive State sector. I believe we could go significantly further in that. I encourage the Government to adopt a cross-party approach to find a way in which we can focus on the outcomes of the State sector and the way in which it serves our communities and break down the silos. If we do thatI believe that we will be proud of our efforts. But I do believe that in Part 3 there are some good measures that we can and should all support.