Originally Posted by
Count von Count
I am going to disagree with you about the public service. I / the family have had some contacts with the health sector over the last 15 years, and they have been uniformly excellent - especially the hospital-based services. Good healthcare does not make newspaper headlines. My kids are getting excellent educations in the public sector - one of them has learning needs, and her last two schools have been responsive, creative and encouraging. She is doing well, and remains really engaged in her learning. When something happened a while ago, the Police were amazing, and this helped with insurance claims and so forth.
The problem with the public sector is often not a lack of competence, but a lack of investment. Talking to the health staff that have been managing us at Starship, they have the same number of positions that they had 20 years ago, but the population they are dealing with is close to 50% bigger. Their IT is antiquated - they were still arm-wrestling with Windows 7. Our local Intermediate school finally got a new build completed for some new classrooms - the MoE had a leaky building nightmare they had to deal with at other schools - but their roll has increased by 40% in 12 years, with the same number of funded teaching positions.
The issue is that when our economy was smashing it, it was mostly based around immigration and protein production. We put those savings into largely meaningless tax cuts, incentivised property investment and thought that we could continue to grow the population (and reap the benefits in terms of the labour force and economic gain) without bothering to look at what sorts of resources those people might need, and plan ahead accordingly.
So my experience is that the public sector is pretty good. My hypothesis is that they are strained due to successive governments either kicking the can down the road, or not having the skills and awareness to properly plan for the future. My belief is that the public sector isn't like a tap - you can't turn it on and off depending on what the government of the day does. It needs steady investment to properly thrive.