Stuff: Labour's rearranging of the furniture does not amount to a vision
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When their political careers end, perhaps Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern should take up interior decoration, since they so enjoy rearranging the furniture. Whether it be polytechs, the health sector, or even the current talk of the town, Three Waters, they appear convinced that restructuring – the shuffling around of agencies and staff – is the surest route to success.
All governments are prone to restructure: it gives the appearance of being busy. When National was last in office, Steven Joyce created a bizarre super-ministry, MBIE, by wrapping housing into economic development. Labour then had to restore housing to a ministry of its own. But fewer excuses can be found for its other restructures.
Take the long-running reform of vocational education, which involves a mega-merger of the country’s 16 polytechs and institutes of technology into one body, Te Pūkenga. Nowhere do the reform documents adequately explain why this new body, unwanted by the public, is needed.
Yes, some polytechs are collapsing, partly because there is too much unnecessary competition, too many institutions offering duplicated courses. But this could surely be fixed by the existing Ministry of Education taking a stronger hand with the sector, rather than creating yet another centralised bureaucracy, distant from local communities.
And what is the wider vision here? The reform documents contain the usual banal, management-speak bingo: the new system, we are told, will be “collaborative, flexible, innovative and sustainable”. But there’s no inspiring, fully worked-out conception of a lifelong learning system in which public funds ensure people’s skills and interests are perpetually renewed.
Andrew Little’s health reforms suffer the same issues. Even if few lament the passing of district health boards (DHBs), is wrenching structural change really the solution to their defects?
Their duplication, admittedly, makes them an easy target: 20 seems too many for such a small nation. And everyone loathes the postcode lottery that leaves rural West Coasters receiving worse care than urban Wellingtonians.
But guess what? It’s impossible to deliver care completely from the centre. So the health white paper envisages “four regional divisions and a range of district offices (Population Health and Wellbeing Networks in DHB localities)”. Service decisions will still be made “close to the ground”. Welcome to the new bureaucracy, much the same as the old one.
For many issues, structural change is irrelevant. When a Christchurch woman crashes her car in Wellington, the local A&E doctors may have no access to her medical records. So let’s mandate information-sharing between agencies. Why leap straight to restructuring – especially when it’s so disruptive? Even public-sector HR managers think it “costs a lot and promises more than it actually delivers”, one New Zealand study found.
Little’s reforms will heighten uncertainty and stress for already burnt-out health workers, and damage future morale. British research suggests that, after a major restructure, staff can take five to six years to regain their former productivity.
The wastefulness is mind-blowing. And time spent restructuring is time that could have been spent improving services straightaway.
In health, again, vision is lacking. Labour could have promised to fund a truly preventative health system – the fence at the top of the cliff, not the ambulance at the bottom – or one centred on community-based care, backed by new technologies that allow self-monitoring and treatment. But nothing so innovative is clearly set out, only gestured at vaguely.
Ironically, of all the government’s proposed restructures, it is the most controversial, Three Waters, that is actually the least troublesome. The four centralised water bodies would create economies of scale, co-governance with Māori is welcome, and the water sector’s core goals – well-maintained pipes, reduced contamination, and so on – rely more on centralised standards than local sensitivity.
Still, the political backlash may require an alternative plan: forcing councils to set aside more money for infrastructure, for instance, or centralising delivery only where they fail to meet exacting quality standards. Restructuring can be politically costly even when right pragmatically.
Taken together, the restructures – even in education and health – may not be an unmitigated failure. They’re just not what you’d do if you knew what you were doing. For there’s no disguising this Government’s lack of a coherent outlook. Values and ideas aren’t in short supply; they simply haven’t coalesced into an ambitious and cohesive worldview.
Within modern-day Labour, ideology is, in the words of one former adviser, “about as popular as flared trousers”. Even when flexible, ideology makes clear what you stand for – and therefore what you don’t. It forces difficult discussions, and leads to people leaving your beloved broad tent.
Vision, for a left-wing party, also tends to be expensive, and Labour has never wanted to have tough conversations with the electorate about tax. Much easier, instead, to talk mushily about values few could dislike (kindness, anyone?), muddle some policies through, and keep on rearranging that furniture.