Bill Ralston has had a couple of goes at the public service in his recent blogs. In particular he has come out swinging in support of Treasury Secretary John Whitehead’s speech on Monday. I will write a full response to Bill’s comments in next few days, but I just wanted to note that there is a bit of a contrast in analysis between Bill and John Armstrong in today’s Herald.

Bill was pretty critical of my statement that the speech was a precursor for privatisation and deeper cuts to the public service. Today Armstrong says

Whitehead’s sugar-coated prosletyzing for what is clearly intended to be holus-bolus privatising of services delivered by state agencies went way beyond a chief executive’s brief.

and

Clearly, however, both the Treasury and English - who this week revealingly said he wanted the reforms in the state sector to “stick” so that no future government can unravel them - are using the recession as cover to reduce the role of the state and strip back the public service to some kind of skeletal level that will make it difficult to rebuild.

He also picks up the theme of my stalking horses post the other day, with a slightly different take, but certainly emphasising that this was an unusual speech for the Treasury Secretary to make.  Hopefully get my full response to Bill up tomorrow.