Targets are fine – but where are the plans and resources?

March 16, 2012

I should be elated. I should be punching the air like a golfer who’s made a hole-in-one. The government has set 10 targets for the public sector over the next three to five years, and they all look pretty damn good to me!

Goals like reducing the number of assaults on children, reducing criminal reoffending and increasing participation in early childhood education are what we all want, surely. And the government is stating publicly that it will be judged on these goals (although the five-year horizon takes it three years beyond the next election so there is a hunk of wriggle room).

So why does hearing and reading this news make me feel dejected and patronised? Because of the rider John Key added at the end of the announcement of the targets – that ministers and chief executives of the public service departments would be held accountable for achieving the targets.

All this in a series of moves that see funding cuts to government departments and laying off of public servants – the people you need to actually achieve the ambitious targets.

I doubt very much that if a target isn’t met, a minister will cop the blame. It will be passed down to the senior civil servants who will be blamed for not controlling or motivating their staff. CEOs will be sacked and further restructuring will take place, neither of which will actually achieve anything except make the prime minister and his government look like they’re doing something.

Achieving most if not all of the targets will need concrete plans and extra, well-aimed funding. How do you reduce the amount of crime, or the number of assaults on children? By putting in resources such as one-on-one social worker intervention within at-risk families. And resources like these need money.

Of course, what John Key and Steven Joyce and their friends are actually doing is framing the discussion on the size of the public service as an issue of how well they could be doing if they worked more efficiently, when in fact the real goal is a financial one – to cut funding and jobs in the public sector and thereby save money. That reality is negative and provocative, so they frame it in words that are more appealing – “we’re not trying to cut jobs and save money, we’re trying to see the public service operate more efficiently to achieve these targets”.

The Government can proclaim targets until the cows come home; without specific plans and the funded resources required to achieve them, they are merely a sideshow intended as a smokescreen to mislead an uncritical voting population.

Recently I made a submission to the Green Paper on Vulnerable Children. It was nice for the Government to ask us for our ideas and opinions on ways to reduce damage to children, but their invitation to submit came with an explicit, depressing condition – there will be no extra social welfare funds, so anything you suggest means funds coming from elsewhere. Again, great intentions, but no extra resources.

Or take the “reduce offending” target. How on earth can you do that without setting up rehabilitation and halfway-house programmes, which generally require lots of specialist staff and expensive resources?

So here’s the scenario we should expect. Take the target of “increasing the proportion of 18-year-olds with NCEA level 2 or its equivalent from 68% to 85%”.

1. Specific goals will be laid out by the education mullahs in Wellington to get better teachers, increase ‘efficiency’ by reducing the number of courses taught, or other Great Ideas.

2. Education practitioners and schools will point out that this can only be done without making huge class sizes if there is more funding and more and better trained teachers. The populace, encouraged by right-wing commentators, will say this is just the teachers’ unions exerting their power. The Ministry, which due to job cuts now has fewer people working on developing more professional development for teachers, says there is no money for teachers so just Do It.

3. In three or five years, statistics will suggest that the target has not been met. The politicians will work on massaging the stats hoping to make them look better, saying they don’t give the full picture or were based on faulty data or using changed baselines, and argue that it was the previous government’s fault anyway.

4. When this doesn’t quite work, they’ll say that the Department needs restructuring (“get rid of more back-office staff”) to achieve the results and plea for another term in office to prove they were on the right track. And sack a few CEOs – that always looks like strong government in the media.

 

Leave a Comment » | Education, Politics, Social issues | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

Is Hone Harawira coming of age?

February 28, 2012

I am becoming increasingly impressed with the Mana Party leader Hone Harawira – and given the bad press he drew over the past couple of years due to his use of shall we say colourful language in public, that is a rather brave statement for a man of my vintage and sensibilities to make.

I may be wrong, but I believe Hone is learning that he can express strong sentiments and forceful arguments publicly without the use of four-letter words. The result, as I observe it, is that we can now see that the man does indeed have depth and clarity in his thinking and simple eloquence in its expression.

I venture to say that if he can keep this up through the current parliamentary term, he will indeed be able to claim mana among those he represents as well as the respect of the broad population, in the same way that Pita Sharples has in recent years.

The Labour Party should now be reversing its silly policy of the last election campaign, when it said it would never work with Hone (while still being happy to work with a man of far less integrity in Winston Peters).

This morning I heard Hone speak on the radio about the social welfare changes, and I was impressed with his clarity of message. No fudging around, just calling a spade a spade. And no sounding like an angry victim. To me he represented and laid out in simple terms the counter-argument in the debate – that the “reforms” in reality are not about getting more people into jobs, but dog-whistling to the National party’s electorate that beneficiaries will be dealt to. And that if there is no actual training programmes for people looking for jobs, and no actual jobs being created, then there is no point.

In contrast, National’s minister for Social Welfare, Paula Bennett, sounded full of platitudes about unspecified training and hoped-for new jobs but offered no actual plans, just estimates by officials with no reasons for the numbers quoted.

I was similarly most impressed by Harawira’s response a few weeks ago to Paul Holmes’s sad, nasty Waitangi Day column in the Herald. There was Hone – usually despised by the mainly pakeha majority for his poor choice of words – this time being the voice of reason, not taking Holmes’s poisonous bait but rather just setting out the real facts, firmly but without vitriol, no punches pulled but all above the belt.

I was also surprised and Impressed to see how well Hone stood up and put forward a respectful, well reasoned position during the televised minor-leaders debate during the last election. His contributions were worthy of a major opposition party, not just the ramblings of a marginal party.

At the risk of sounding sycophantic, I could also express pleasure at seeing the grace, style and humour that Hone showed at the events at Waitangi. Given the prominent – and roundly criticised – role that his family has taken at the Waitangi Day celebrations/protests over the past decade or so, it was a pleasure to see a more measured and laid-back approach from their highest profile representative. I’m sure that he still feels strongly about the treaty issues that he has fought over, but he is learning to couch his convictions in a good humoured way that is mindful of other opinions.

I think that Hone Harawira is coming of age and, with the Maori Party leadership aging and struggling to keep their identity while being a government coalition partner, he (and his party) is well poised to become the main voice for Maori political aspirations through this decade.

I’ve blogged before about some politicians who have impressed me with their direct, honest approach to New Zealanders. Pita Sharples had, and maybe still has, mana but his position within government is making it ever harder to provide an independent Maori perspective. Steven Joyce I once saw as a refreshingly direct interviewee but now I can see that under pressure he is simply driven by the need to spin facts in order to avoid inconvenient counter-arguments. And John Key – again I was mildly impressed in his early prime ministerial days with his directness, but that has long worn off and now I see little to admire in his bland dismissal of anything that doesn’t interest or please him.

No, I may be wrong but …. Hone Harawira is now the person I could soon find myself respecting most among our political leaders.

1 Comment | Maori issues, Politics, Social issues | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

Mixed feelings on Occupy movement

January 5, 2012

I’ve been pondering my attitude to the “Occupy” demonstration movement, given my history of taking part in demonstrations in my 20s and 30s and my empathy with people who are prepared to take an unpopular stand and be abused for it.

The curious thing for me is that I don’t seem to be able to muster much feeling about it, one way or the other. Why would that be?

Hopefully it’s not that I’ve passed a certain age when the discomfort of unpopular protesting is unattractive; when the people seen on the TV in their occupation tents look scruffy, insincere or thoughtless; when I think I have better things to do with my limited time. Pity help me if I’m letting that level of superficiality affect my judgment!

My first problem (and that of so many other people who are not up with spontaneous social media networking and the like) is that the target of the Occupy movement – especially in New Zealand – is not clearly defined. On the Vietnam war and the Springbok tour, we all knew precisely what the issue was and what we protesters (and our opposition) wanted. With Occupy, the target appears to be the ultra-rich 1% of the capitalist world. Or is it the capitalist system as a whole? Or is it the establishment? I guess the ambiguity reflects the difference between a “campaign” and a “movement”.

And if the target of the occupiers is one or all of these, exactly what is it that they would rather do and how would they start to achieve it. Unlike Vietnam or “the tour”, there is no single action or policy change that will stop excessive greed/wealth/capitalism.

So I find it difficult to rouse a feeling of solidarity with the occupiers as they camp out on public land in Auckland, Wellington and several other centres. Also, compared with the size of the occupying “forces” and the policing responses in America and the UK, the Kiwi groups are pretty ineffectual, apart from causing some short-term damage to grass cover, some health issues and general annoyance to a minority of opponents.

It’s actually a problem for protesters if no-one is inconvenienced or angered by them, so it is to be expected that the occupiers will persist and try new tactics even when many think they’ve had their fair time. But in the end their gains will be small, if any.

On the other side of the coin, the right to protest is in my opinion absolutely vital to any healthy society. Near the top of my list of life’s guiding principles will always be the knowledge that all it takes for a dictatorship to be established is for good people to say and do nothing. To not stand up against bad policies is to pay no respect to the people over the centuries who fought for democracy and individual freedom.

So the occupiers are right to keep before our faces one of the biggest societal problems the world is now facing – the growing gap between the ultra-wealthy 1% and the so-called 99% who must show restraint in their life choices or are simply too poor to have any economic options at all. The issue should be something we are all aware of and prepared to think about.

Is the wealth gap one of our biggest problems? Like an increasing number of commentators in recent months, I believe it is. Particularly the notion that the gap between the top few percent and the rest is actually widening. It’s a huge problem – and a potential time bomb – because the consequences affect every part of every society – even, eventually, the top 1%. But that’s too big an issue for me to tackle in this article, so I’ll give it some further thought in a separate post soon.

1 Comment | Community living, Economics, Social issues | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

Rising executive salary levels cannot be justified

December 20, 2011

Along with most Christchurch people, if this morning’s letters to the editor are any indication, I am appalled by their city council’s decision to give its CEO Tony Marryatt a 15% pay rise to well over $500,000.

I won’t argue the merits of his salary in his particular setting, apart from agreeing with sentiments in the scores of letters which filled the opinion pages of The Press. So many people in that quake-broken city are hanging on by a thread, financially and emotionally, and the rest of the country is being reminded ad nauseum of the need for restraint in wage expectations and government spending.

This decision is an insult to all except the upper clique of officials and corporate bosses who increasingly are losing contact with the rest of the population.

Executive salaries have bothered me for years. I’ve tried to keep an open mind, aware of the arguments of supporters generally along the lines of (a) you have to pay what the market demands, and (b) you suffer from wealth envy. But it just doesn’t wash.

1. The “market demand” argument is run by the people who benefit most from it. The “market” for senior executives is small and created by the senior execs themselves. They maintain it by bidding each other up. Each new position is filled by someone who is already in the clique but who demands or expects more money. The whole thing must be unsustainable – you just cannot keep bidding up the rewards at a rate faster than the underlying rate of economic growth without the system ultimately falling apart through its own illogicality or a rebellion by “the masses”.

2. That so-called market is rarely tested. With most workers, excessive wage demands lose you the job. The labour market works pretty efficiently, be it fairly or because of ruthless control from the bosses. But when hiring a new senior executive no-one seems to have the guts to say, we can get someone else if you demand too high a salary. There really is no effective market for the top dogs, so they cannot justify it through “market forces”.

3. One would like to believe that quality senior executives would see job satisfaction, their leadership status and the knowledge that they are useful as part of the reason they take on such positions, not just the pay. Many people do outstanding work of great benefit to society without the motivation of being paid an obscene fortune to do it.

4. In Christchurch in particular, the recovery process is clearly reliant on many people in leadership positions going the extra mile without expecting big money in return. That’s how the city will rebuild. It’s insulting and depressing to the ordinary people who are making this extra effort that their leaders are seen to be doing it mainly for the money.

5. In Marryatt’s case, it has long been known that he desperately wanted the job anyway. He and his supporters reportedly fought tooth and nail to retain his position. It’s not as if the council needed to give him a big pay rise to keep him.

 

3 Comments | Business, Social issues | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

“Matters to a Head” – a book review

September 29, 2011

I’ve just finished reading a most remarkable book. It wasn’t that the writing was exceptionally polished, or the editing, though both are well above average for a self-published book. It wasn’t that the plot had any great unexpected twists and turns, or a cast of notable characters. What made it remarkable to me was its unabashed truth-telling and unapologetic rawness. No euphemisms, no hedging; just telling it as it was.

The book is Matters to a Head, written by Kate K and set partly in my home town Motueka, and published last month. Many locals know Kate, the daughter of a past mayor, who went off the rails in her later teenage life. Some of them may not know that she has been able to turn her life around since then. This book is a straight-up, almost humourous at times, account of the downward slide to the absolute pits and the struggle back up.

Being a relatively recent “immigrant” to Motueka, I didn’t know Kate before now, but I had the honour of meeting and talking with her and her mum (whose long-suffering role figures often in the book) recently, a face-to-face which made the subsequent reading so poignant. I’m an exceptionally slow reader but once I got into this book I found it hard to put down.

The plot is simple. Kate became totally addicted to cannabis and alcohol and also developed bipolar depression. (She is not certain of the cause and effect, if any, between the two diagnoses, but is not afraid to consider the possibilities.) As a result, she spent some time in psychiatric institutions.

For the first two-thirds of the book she traces the events and actions which drew her to the absolute rock bottom. The remarkable thing to me is that during the process, over several years, she was sufficiently self-aware of the damage she was doing to herself that she could remember it so clearly to write about it afterwards.

We gain detailed insight into the state of mind of a drug addict, and painful views of what it’s like in a loony bin (my words). Like many readers, I imagine, I have no strong addictive traits so find it hard to see why someone can make such poor decisions and knowingly allow their life to be so damaged. As Kate tells you of the next time she got into a stoned existence yet again, just as you thought she was starting to work her way upward, you find yourself being like the kid watching the puppet show, yelling out “The monster is just behind you!!”. No Kate, don’t go back there!

If this sounds like a gritty drug expose, it’s actually very readable because, thankfully, Kate has a playful, wry sense of humour which she lets flow through some of the sad parts of the narrative.

The final one-third documents the seven-year (so far) struggle back to a degree of wellness, thanks largely to Narcotics Anonymous and supportive friends – and her great talent for direct, fearless writing. She talks of her growing awareness of the healing process which has been working for her.

She also writes about her hard-learned opinions about the way mental health services are provided in New Zealand, where it is damaging and why, and where new improvements are being made, in some places thanks to her own recent work as a registered nurse and advocate for peer support structures.

I spoke to her wonderful, long-suffering mum the other day and she said that Kate still had times when she could be vulnerable to depression, but that with support she now has the tools to make sure it didn’t happen. After reading of so much carnage and despair, it’s heartwarming to know that there can be happier endings.

Matters to a Head is available online at matterstoahead.co.nz

Leave a Comment » | Health, Social issues | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

« Previous Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 25 other followers