What does Bill English’s manic grin tell us?

Friday, 19 February 2016, 2:29 pm
Article: Max Rashbrooke

When he’s giving a speech, our finance minister’s default expression is one of sober reasonableness. Everything is calm, reassuring, commonsense and practical. But there are these strange moments where Bill English will say something blindingly obvious, and give a slightly manic, fixed grin.

This happened at his speech yesterday to the Institute for Public Administration, a yearly exercise in which – wearing his hat as champion of public sector reform – he tells us where things are at in that great engine we call government. Explaining the ‘social investment approach’, which in crude terms is a way of calculating what policies are most cost-effective based on how much they save the government long-term, he said that policy-makers needed to identify what they were trying to achieve, and if they saw a problem, "We should do something about it!" At this point the fixed grin came out.

It was a moment that said something important about how our public services will be changed in coming years. The reason English grins in this way, I think, is because he is, in his mind, talking to his public service workers and telling them something that should be blindingly obvious but which isn’t because they are ineffectual Wellington liberals who don’t actually know what will make a difference in the lives of people in Waitangirua or South Auckland. The grin manifests a grim kind of humour in the gap, as he sees it, between reality and bureaucracy.

This perceived gap matters because, contrary to the stereotype that this government is an arch-neoliberal one, English clearly wants better, more effective government (albeit smaller government, too), rather than to do away with it entirely, as neoliberals would seek to do.

As he said in his speech: "It's simply not enough to service misery. It is our task to reduce it.” So, for instance, the government is creating an online portal that should, in a few years, allow anyone to quickly and easily see their payments from the IRD and WINZ, and work out how those would change if their work changes.

As English says, at present, "The lower your income, the more complex your interaction with government is … If we expect them [people on low incomes] to take up an offer for another five hours of work a week, they can't know... the impact of that on their payments from government for 12-18 months." Addressing this ludicrous failure is something that benefits’ advocates have been calling for, and English has listened.

Overall, English’s logic is that if we deliver better services, more social problems will be addressed, the cost of dealing with them will fall, and government spending can be reduced – which latter point is, for a centre-right social conservative, the key objective.

So better public services are in his sights. The problem is that, as the fixed-grin moments suggest, he often seems to see public sector workers as obstacles to achieving that goal. He will say, as he did yesterday, that public agencies “are full of good and capable people”, but immediately add that “often they have little idea of whether their work makes a difference beyond [meeting] the immediate needs.”

If the answer to this is more evidence-based policy – and English signalled that future Budget bids will have to show how they will work, and reach people, much more rigorously than before – then no-one could argue. But frequently the answer seems to be to cut the public service out of the picture. Hence the policy of selling off Housing New Zealand flats to developers and charities. An NGO might be good at working with people with disabilities, English said, whereas Housing New Zealand isn’t and won’t be.

It’s a strange attitude, when you think about it. True, Housing New Zealand may not have been a very sympathetic agency to deal with in the past, but that’s only because it hasn’t had a mandate to be. There’s no reason why it can’t be a sensitive, responsive, flexible organisation that builds strong relationships with its tenants. You just have to empower – and fund – it to do that.

When I challenged English on this view, he tried to have a bob each way, both praising government departments – "by international standards, we are pretty damn good … 80% of the population gets a pretty good deal” – but attacking them by saying that whatever they’ve done, “The data tells us that isn't enough."

He also went on to say that government departments are monopolies, and "monopolies will do what monopolies do. Just because they are public ones doesn't mean they are more virtuous."

There’s a strange contradiction in English’s stance, since the way to deal with that monopoly issue is to make departments hyper-responsive and hyper-accountable to what citizens want – which is exactly what he says he wants to happen! There’s no reason to cut the public sector out, and no reason to think that companies and charities will do a better job (it’s worth remembering that their appalling failure to deliver welfare in the nineteenth century is the real reason for the welfare state as we know it). But such is the force of ideology, I suppose.

English’s focus on cost-cutting also leads him to ignore real human harm. Yesterday he trumpeted the claim that since adopting the social investment approach, government had cut the expected future lifetime costs of people in the welfare system by $12 billion. But where that just means lots of people have been pushed off benefits, the government has little idea what has actually happened to people. If they have just ended up in further misery, to use English’s term, that $12 billion is a cost to their lives, not a saving to anyone.

There are many such contradictions. English said yesterday that a desirable outcome for all citizens is “participation in the community”, a relatively liberal and generous aim – but the cruelty that is daily inflicted on people by WINZ cuts right against that. But perhaps contradictions are what one expects when a fiscal conservative takes on social issues – and a man dedicated to public service reform doesn’t always trust his public service.

© Scoop Media

Max Rashbrooke

Journalist

Max Rashbrooke is a journalist and author working in Wellington, New Zealand, where he writes about politics, finance and social issues.

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