The headline on a statement from Education Minister Anne Tolley qualifies for a place on a Tui billboard. Her Ministry is being spruced up “to be more efficient, less bureaucratic.” Of course it will. But while every Ministry has been doing exactly the same thing since the public service was invented, this time there is talk of a productivity commission being set up and running a ruler over Govt departments. Details remain unclear, but Finance Minister Bill English’s office says it will be based on the Aust commission set up in 1998. The Finance Minister’s office said it will “work closely with and be modelled on the Aust commission.”

Catching Aust. Productivity growth is needed because it shows we are getting a bigger bang for our buck. More output from the same amount of input (labour, investment or both) helps lift a nation’s long-term material standard of living. But it is easier to measure productivity gains when the outputs are tangible – cartons of butter, boxes of widgets. The trick is measuring state service outputs. Don Brash – for example – chairs a taskforce finding ways of closing the productivity gap between NZ and Aust by the year 2025. Productivity must grow by around 3% a year. But what has been the taskforce’s output? We could count the pages in its first report, but Finance Minister Bill English dismissed many of the prescriptions in those pages as “too radical” for the Govt to pick up.

Effectiveness And Outcomes. A Labour Dept report (November 2006) is entitled Partnership And Productivity In The Public Sector – A Review Of The Literature. Its review does not begin with a precise definition of public sector productivity. Rather, its orientation from the start stems from some expert’s proposition “the legitimacy of public services is derived from the capacity to respond to the needs of citizens in an economically efficient way.” This reflects an emerging consensus public sector productivity involves not only efficiency and outputs, but also effectiveness and outcomes. The answer may be to give all public servants computers and encourage them to surf the net at work for pleasure. According to a University of Melbourne study this increases concentration levels and helps make a more productive workforce. Workers who engage in Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t. But this still leaves us with having to measure what public servants who engage in WILB have actually produced.

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