| |
Will Queensland have a Workable Government? - email sent 6/8/12
Daniel Hurst,
Brisbane Times
RE:
Has Newman broken public sector promises?, Brisbane Times¸6/8/12
Your article posed relevant questions about whether or not
the Newman Government has broken election promises to public sector employees.
However, while this is an important matter for those
employees and their union representatives, the question that should most concern
the general public is whether or not Queensland’s Government can be effective in
future after
again
politicising and then ‘taking an axe’ to the public service?
My interpretation of your article: Unions
claim that Queensland’s premier broke election promises related to the public
service. Mr Newman did indicate last year that size of public service could fall
through natural attrition. In December 2011 Mr Newman said that total size of
public sector was in his sights – and suggested that while headcount might fall
those in frontline services would often rise. A gradual change was envisaged to
make public sector affordable. This was seen to be needed because Labor had
allowed public service to become too large to be affordable. Some months later
he said that public service could become bigger – though at only a slow rate.
Expenses have gone up faster than revenues, so this needs to be corrected. Just
prior to the election a 3% cap on public service employee expenses was announced
– which implied a slowing in the growth of employee numbers. The then Treasurer
said this could mean public service cuts. In response Mr Nicholls and Mr Newman
did rule out forced redundancies, and suggested that restructuring will be
through natural attrition. And initially the Newman government started this
process, but is now engaged in removing thousands of public service positions.
The state has been said to have 20,000 public servants beyond what it can
afford. Prior to the election the LNP had: (a) stated that it would better
control numbers of non-front-line staff – but few would have though this implied
current cuts; and (b) reducing temporary employment – which would have been seen
as making such positions permanent. Thousands of temporary contracts have been
eliminated. Tougher action is justified on the basis of Commission of Audit’s
warning that state spending had grown unsustainably, and that Queensland was
borrowing for operational expenses. Before the election Mr Newman had said that:
(a) the audit report would not lead to cancelling prior commitments; but (b) if
the report showed that Labor had ‘cooked the books’ this would need to be
reconsidered. He now says that union pushes for high wage increases would make
the situation more difficult. However he expressed a different view last year
(ie that ALP should not penalise staff will limited wage rises, because of its
inability to manage state’s finances). Promises were made that frontline
services would be revitalised, though some are now being cut (eg Skilling
Queenslanders for Work program). Job-security and no-outsourcing provisions of
existing enterprise bargaining agreements are being challenged – though LNP
previous said that it would not do so. The debate continues, but LNP is taking
more direct action than it said during election campaign.
In
relation to the actions that are being taken, it is suggested that:
- The potential for Queensland to face financial problems has been
apparent for about a decade (see
Underlying Pressures for increased State Taxation, 2003+). The fact that
neither the then Government nor the Opposition (nor business
associations, nor unions, nor
universities, nor the media) seemed conscious of this issue says something about
the chronic weakness of Queensland’s institutions;
- The primary source of Queensland’s current financial plight (and
the reason that it is now necessary to borrow ‘for recurrent spending’) seems to
be a massive escalation in not-particularly-effective infrastructure investment
(see
Recovering from Queensland's Debt Binge, March 2012);
- The LNP probably meant what was said before the elections about
favouring incremental change to the public sector through natural attrition
(noting your observation that the present Government initially set up that
process), but has been shocked by the severity of the financial problems that it
found itself facing. And it is noted in this respect that the Commission of
Audit does not seem to have looked very hard for instances of ‘cooking the
books’ that the present writer thought were fairly obvious more than a decade
ago (see
Auditing the Commission, June 2012);
- What is now being done to ‘fix’ Queensland’s financial woes is
overly simplistic as there are many alternatives to ‘taking an axe to the public
service’, and many risks associated with doing so. Reasons for this were
suggested in
Auditing the Commission (see
Inadequate Goals and
Inadequate Methods) and in
Beyond Populist Rhetoric (March 2011). The latter referred (for example) to:
- Options to get more serious about economic development, and thus
create a stronger tax base and revenue stream;
- Addressing structural weaknesses in Queensland’s machinery of
government, and in methods for developing infrastructure in particular;
- Focusing on government’s core ‘business’ (ie governing) – which
would orient the public sector towards reducing costs and red tape, while
addressing financial constraints along with the many other challenges that
Queensland faces;
- Clarifying relationships between the public and private sectors;
- The knowledge, skills and experience of the public service
(especially those in non-frontline roles) is critical to any democratic
governments’ ability to govern effectively and avoid crises. This is well
demonstrated by the experiences of governments in Queensland since the
politicisation of the public service first gained bipartisan political
endorsement over 20 years ago (eg see
Improving Public Sector Performance in Queensland, and the many other
documents referenced at the top of
Towards a Professional Public Service). What is now being done to the public
service will not only lead to union outrage, personal stresses and community
discontent about lost services, it will also render the Newman Government
susceptible to serious policy miscalculations like those that plagued its
predecessors.
Unfortunately Queenslanders can probably only look forward
to ‘more of the same’ poor government - now compounded by severe financial
constraints and escalating social stresses.
John Craig
|