www.oocities.org/ubinz/press/1999905SundaySupplAMillar.html

In late 1987 delivered a Sunday Supplement based on an analysis of the then State Sector Bill which shortly thereafter, with indecent haste for such a structurally important piece of legislation, became the State Sector Act. I quote from that item, "Anyone familiar with how the Public service really works will conclude that this Bill will create a tax-paid work force of either excessively servile or excessively mercenary individuals. Neither category makes a good public servant."

I take no pleasure in having been proved correct in that prophetic utterance.

The State Sector Act, along with the Employment Contracts Act, is one of the main pillars of the new right legislative structure, which now dominates us. Unlike the ECA it has not, until the recent escalating series of conspicuous foul-ups, excited the same media attention and debate.

The State Sector Act is specifically designed, in my assessment, one based on nearly forty years of close involvement with the public service, to create a Government, note not a Public, service, which is sculpted to serve the interests of the Government of the day, not those of the people.

After its implementation in 1988 the traditional career, non corrupt, publicly accountable, non political, public service was deliberately and systematically undermined and then destroyed to be replaced by a system where public employees are working in an atmosphere of creeping secrecy, instability, insecurity, devoid of rights, a culture of an amalgam of attempts to lead them on by appeals to individual greed or where that fails to drive them on by fear of dismissal.

There was, and remains, a deliberate campaign against state employees espousing the public interest. They are specifically forbidden to do that. Whistle blowers are punished and dismissed if caught.

Where the interest of the currently dominant group of politicians, the government, is contrary to the interests of the public it is the duty of government servants to protect the minister and the government not the public whose taxes pay their wages. As an example, endlessly government servants ignore the time requirements of the Official Information Act in the interests of their ministerial masters who being the beneficiaries of this illegal practice appear to encourage and endorse it.

Each year the number of government employees who remember the old ethically sound pre 1998 system gets less. Many have left in disgust. Increasingly the senior ranks appear to have one thing in common, they all appear to have graduated from the Benito Mussolini Academy of Corporate Management.

The old style public service, with all its deficiencies, was one designed to service an active and sincere democracy

The new State Service has all the hallmarks, in my view, of one designed to administer a corporate model that is an undemocratic system of government. If fascism were to become dominant in this fair land tomorrow the dictators would not have to alter the State Sector Act. It would serve their purpose admirably.

How utterly hypocritical it is for the architects and vigorous supporters of this pernicious system to now raise their hands in mock horror and criticism. It is simply doing what they designed it to do.

How the decent honest public servants, and many are still there albeit scared to put their heads above the parapet, must despise what they have been seduced or forced into becoming.

A non-corrupt, politically neutral, career, public service, founded on an ethic of public service is central to a democratic, more egalitarian, New Zealand.

Let's keep that in mind as a priority when we vote next election. We the pubic pay the piper through our taxes, not the politicians, Let us call the tune! Once more let there be a public service, which is proud to serve the Public, Not as clients, Not as the Customer but as the Citizen!