Nicola Willis ‘impatient’ for more change to public service

Friday, 22 November 2024

Welcome to The Post series ‘Inside the cuts’ which documents aspects of what it was like inside the public service when job cuts began occurring. Nicola Willis ‒ finance and public service minister, and the woman who spearheaded the Government’s cost saving cuts to the public service ‒ talks about her vision for the public service.

Nicola Willis is impatient for change. She wants to do things differently.

“I am wanting us to think bolder,” the public service and finance minister says.

“There are many issues in New Zealand that have actually been unsolved over successive governments.

“They have been problems for decades. And it’s not a necessarily a National Party problem or a Labour Party problem, it’s that actually we haven’t been bold enough and brave enough to say, well, maybe the way that we’ve been doing it isn’t the best way, and we need to change it quite significantly.

“Instead of adding just more policy programmes, how could the public service make sure that its resources are better joined up, are devolved down to community, that they're actually being hard-headed about measuring the impact that those initiatives are having?

“That will require quite a change in the way that the public service works.”

It will involve giving away power, she says ‒ from “level 15” to the grass roots.

Willis is asked if the public service now reflects the Government she is a part of.

“We have made progress in focusing the public services efforts and resource on the priorities of the government,” Willis says.

“I've also seen the public service quite properly, maintain its integrity, its neutrality, and have that consistency of approach, which is really positive to see.”

But she wants more.

“I'm impatient for more change in the sense that the social investment agenda for me, requires public agencies to work quite differently.

“We want to see resources evolve further to those delivering impact to families and communities. We don’t want them having to navigate a spaghetti soup of contracts.”

Over the next two years, Willis expects a public service “that is always asking, how can we use our current resources to deliver more impact for the people we serve?”

“I don't want to see a continuation of the layer cake approach in which we always add more and more resource and never stop to say, ‘OK, if this is our priority, what is now a lower priority, and how could we shift the resources from that lower priority so that we can fund the higher priority?’

“That's the practice that small businesses use by default. There's no other area really of New Zealand life where you can expect that there's always going to be more money flowing in.

“And the public service, I think, is quite capable of doing that prioritisation, adjusting its resources, making sure that we're focusing on the things that matter most. And I think public servants are up to the challenge.”