11. Question No. 11—Public ServiceSIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga) to the Minister for the Public ServiceQuestion No. 11—Public Service11. SIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga) to the Minister for the Public Service: Does he stand by all of his statements and actions regarding pay and workforce expectations for the public sector?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for the Public Service): Yes in the context in which they occurred.Simeon Brown: Does the Minister believe the public is getting value for money with a 49 percent increase in taxpayer funding for civil servants in Wellington since 2017 when Kiwis are facing worse outcomes in education hospital wait times and police response times?SPEAKER: Order! Order! I'm going to give the member a chance to rephrase it in two ways. One to tie it to the primary question—the statements and the actions of the Minister—and secondly to drop the British term civil servants". We don't have civil servants in New Zealand.Simeon Brown: Does the Minister stand by his statement in May regarding pay and workforce expectations and the need for value for money when there has been a 49 percent increase in taxpayer funding for public servants in Wellington since 2017 when Kiwis are facing worse outcomes in education hospital wait times and police response times?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: First of all I think the member confuses where those public servants are based and the nature of the work that they are undertaking. Not all of those public servants are based in Wellington. In fact a large number of them are spread throughout the country. It includes greater front-line staff for the Ministry of Education for example who provide direct support to schools and to children to improve educational outcomes that he has just mentioned. It does include the people working for Ministry of Social Development and the IRD providing amongst other things the wage subsidy which has kept the economy alive over the last 18 months. It includes extra people working at Oranga Tamariki to provide support and care to some of our most vulnerable children and families. The list of those examples could go on. The members opposite may want to call them bureaucrats; we call them public servants.Simeon Brown: How many of the 14000 additional public sector employees that have been employed since 2017 are employed directly as part of the COVID response and isn't it true that the headcount had already increased by 5000 before COVID hit?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: It depends ultimately how you calculate that. Somewhere between 40 percent to half of the overall number accounts for response to COVID. So that includes people working in things like managed isolation and quarantine it includes extra people working at the border the people running the vaccination campaign the people doing contact tracing the people managing testing the people delivering the wage subsidy and all of those other COVID-19 directly related initiatives. There's a mix of permanent and short-term staffing involved in those numbers.Simeon Brown: Why did the Government hire over 500 new public service managers in the last year but not invest in adding ICU beds until month 21 of the pandemic?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Well the latter part of the member's question is absolutely wrong. In terms of the first part of the question as I've indicated the increased number of public servants has been very closely connected to many aspects of our overall COVID-19 response. For example to have managed isolation facilities across the country we need people to manage them.Simeon Brown: How does the almost doubling of the number of public service employees earning over $400000 per year show "pay restraint" as required by the Public Service Commissioner's guidance to Public Service agencies in 2020?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I think one of the things we need to do is recognise that the nature of some of the roles being undertaken has changed and that we are ultimately recruiting in a competitive market for those people at senior levels of the Public Service.Hon Grant Robertson: You don't want to bag someone's success. They've worked hard.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: But I do welcome—SPEAKER: Order! Order! Order! Look I don't know what sort of—it's boys' day out or something. Can the pair of you just—Hon Simon Bridges: He provoked me.Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern: That was yesterday.SPEAKER: No no no. Well I don't need the Prime Minister to help either. I could get in trouble if I speculated at what was causing it and I'll stop but the finance spokespeople are both to stay silent until the end of question time.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Of course what the member misses in his question is that the overall rate of pay for chief executives for example at the top of the Public Service has actually decreased under this Government."