The speech by John Whitehead, the Secretary of the Treasury, is another example a strategy of the National Party to push controversial ideas out through a series of stalking horses. We saw it with Mark Weldon on SOEs, Whitehead has already done it, and here we go again. This time, however, it is all a bit odd.

John Whitehead is a good public servant. He was a loyal servant of the Labour Government, as he has been of all governments in the 27 years he has been at Treasury. He would simply not do a speech like the one he did yesterday without a clear direction from government. But why John Whitehead, why not Iain Rennie, the State Services Commissioner? Rennie refused to totally endorse Whitehead’s speech in his interview with Kathryn Ryan this morning. Given numerous opportunities to say he supported everything in the speech, he would not do it.

It looks as if SSC and Tony Ryall have largely been left out of what Bill English tells us is a programme for “significant and lasting change to the public service’. Treasury and English are in charge.  It certainly is not what John Key said in October last year:

I also want to reassure people - and this is my second point - that a new National Government is not going to radically reorganise the structure of the public sector… Few problems are solved by significant reorganisations- in fact many more tend to be created.

If we look back over the last few weeks, English has really been upping the ante in terms of state sector. He went out of his way to suggest that teachers and nurses should not expect a pay rise when their agreements expire next year. Now we have him hammering the message about cuts and potential privatisation in the public services. But why? Word has it that some Chief Executives are not going fast enough or deep enough for Mr English and he think a further shot needed to be fired across the bows. This will be interesting, because the current State Sector arrangements do put the power in the hands of the CE. Could some of them be on a collision course with the government?