Andrew Dickens: How can you reduce both public servants and consultants if you want anything done?

Andrew Dickens Afternoons

So it is now officially the silly season as Christopher Luxon finally got off his State of the Nation speech and released his first policy in the election year.

And who saw that coming?

National has promised it would give households with a joint income of up to 180-thousand dollars a year a 25 percent rebate on their child care costs.

Now strangely enough the last politician to use an early education bribe was Jacinda Ardern. And that was only last November and the new settings come in next month.

National has taken that policy a bit further. It's a classic case of not staying in your lane, hijacking another party's policy to swing some of their supporters your way. And that makes it good politics.

The policy is not cheap at $249 million dollars. But National says it will claw that money back from the amount consultants currently charge the government. There's a certain irony that National will fire consultants to give tax rebates so that parents can hire consultants to look after their children.

Now painting the consultants as the bogeymen makes sense on one hand and none on the other.

As Ben Thomas said yesterday "no-one has sympathy for consultants," so they're fine to paint as bad guys. But I think you'll find an awful lot of the consultant economy vote national so they won't be feeling the love. Consultants are a 1.7 billion dollar slice of our economy. Target them and the economy at large will take a hit.

It's easy to scapegoat consultants. But we need to remember that government after government of all colours has made the consultant a more and more necessary evil.

Since the 80s governments have tried to reduce the size of the civil service and their pay by coring out their full time paid experts and hiring consultants project by project. Private practice has been doing this for years. It's the call centre in the Philippines trick.

National has uses them as much as anyone because they are always on a mission to reduce the public service.

So now it works like this.

Politicians, who know nothing, come up with an idea. They hand it to the Civil Service, who have no idea, so they hire a consultant to find out if the idea works and if it does they then advise how to make the idea happen.

More and more the consultants are the ones who scope, cost, plan, and facilitate large projects like roads, bridges, flood protection, and water needs.

So, if you reduce public services you will need private consultants.

Which means the question for National going forward will be, "How can you reduce both public servants and consultants if you want anything to be done?"

And maybe the answer is that National hasn't got anything it wants done.

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