By my reckoning, if Ross Jolly’s character John in Gliding On was still in the public service he would be in his mid 50s and he would probably be Chief Executive of a medium sized government agency by now.

Despite what some in Auckland might think, he will have seen massive change in the public sector in his time. Raewyn is most definitely not bringing the mail around (she works in IT now), there is no tea trolley, (but some nice cafes nearby) and the whole way of working and thinking has changed. John works long hours, and has done for years.

He might well have had his role disestablished in the 1990s, considered becoming a consultant, but felt some loyalty to the public sector, and stuck it out. In the 21st century John has felt some pleasure come back into his work, there are a lot more people around him, a lot more work being done and some good results being seen.

The public sector in New Zealand has been rebuilt under the Labour led government. And didn’t it need to be. While few would deny that there was a need for a real shake-up from the Gliding On days, the market led dogma of the National Government in the 90s, took that to the extreme with radical ‘downsizing’, disestablishment, and the replacement of the culture of service with siloed business units scratching around for resources to do their jobs.

Since 1999 Labour has rebuilt the public service- not in a spending splurge as National would have you believe. Central government spending is around 30% of GDP down from 33% in 1999. The economy has grown in the meantime, but relative spending has in fact dropped. Compared with the rest of the world the size of our state sector is actually below average.

In addition to building capacity across the public service Labour moved away from the binge of expenditure on consultants, down 21% from 1999. There has also been the Review of the Centre exercise that has seen significant realingment in a number of areas including the creation of the Ministry of Social Development (including WINZ, Youth Affairs) and the restructuring of the Transport sector. We have also seen silos broken down in delivery in the provinces with the new Heartland Service Centre.

But as the way we live our life changes with new technology, the way we work and the time we spend at work, so too must our public services. The PSA is leading the way in considering new and innovative ways of moving our public services forward. The centrepiece of this is a report by British thinktank DEMOS.

The report is a high minded piece of work, acknowldging the positive changes of recent times and the importance of strong public services. There is some extraordinary hperbole (” the goal of government is to make citizens the heroes of their own lives” (do we get costumes?) and there is a bit too much emphasis on personalisation of services for my liking, but it is extremely valuable.

The central idea is that services need to be closer to communities, and that they need to be organised and delivered around the idea of solving problems and finding solutions wih communities, not by government acting alone. The report recognises that many of the issues that need the involvement of government are complex and interelated (or ‘messy’ as the report puts it).

The report advocates a far more open approach to communications between government and citizens including things like citizens assemblies, the use of technology (a single government phone number to funnel information requests, complaints etc) and a radical approach to breaking down silos, such as virtual departments to handle cross cutting issues.

All good stuff. It does require re-imagining the public service as an entity of itself. In New Zealand we have a vast array of agencies, departmetns, ministries and service providers, and getting them to work in a cohesive manner is a tough job. But it has to be done- and frankly it is how the public generally view government- as a single entity. The change that needs to be made is that the public see the government as a responsive, inclusive and effective entity.

To do this we need to take up a number of the directions of the report such as getting services closer to communities, communicating in an open fashion and making better use of technology. At a structural level we need to relook at the State Sector Act and the Public Finance Act to ensure that they do not act as an inhibitor to agencies working together.

The report is realistic; it says these things will take time, and sounds the warning that services need economic dynamism and have popular support to ensure there is money to pay for them.

We won’t see anything like this from National of course. The sad reality is that National’s approach to public services is not about engaging in debate like the DEMOS report. It is characterised by attacks on public servants (or useless bureaucrats as John Key called them in the 2005 election) and hyperbolic and frankly distrurbing comments like Tony Ryall’s call for a bureaucratic bonfire.

The news for National is that the ethos of John, Beryl and the rest of the Gliding On crew left the building some time ago. The tired rhetoric of slash and burn and ‘lazy bureaucrats’ in Wellington is not the way forward.

The DEMOS report says the goal of public services should be to help citizens to shape their lives and communities in a democratic partnership. Lofty, but on the right path in my view.