Officially, this drastic reduction in the number of public servants is being justified in terms of reducing government spending and securing much-needed gains in efficiency and effectiveness.
As superficial explanations go, these will probably suffice. Most people regard public servants as a cosseted lot.
Not for them the grim curation of market forces.
No, Minister Willis’ announcement is as likely to elicit more cheers than groans from the broader electorate. The message that New Zealand is living beyond its means has been well and truly taken on board by the all-important ‘‘median voter’’. Many now agree that it is long past time that the state cut its coat according to its cloth.
But, as is so often the case, there are reasons beneath the reasons given. Political and electoral considerations that go far beyond the justifications of the minister’s policy advisers; considerations that most of us fail to appreciate until they are drawn to our attention.
Those of us over 50 will recall the passage of the Employment Contracts Bill in 1991. Its transformational content was also justified in terms of high political principle and grim economic necessity, and there were many who responded positively to the National Party’s pitch.
But there were deeper, less high-minded reasons for passing legislation aimed at reducing the trade union movement to a pale shadow of its former strength and power.
As New Zealand’s trade union density plummeted from just shy of 50% of the paid workforce to a percentage in the mid-teens (and falling), the Kiwi working class lost its economic and political leverage.
And since its place on the nation’s political stage was contingent upon the trade unions’ capacity to exercise that leverage, the working class soon found itself being pushed unceremoniously into the wings. Thirty-five years later, it’s still there.
That Labour has never restored unions to their former status shows just how much it, too, had to gain by seeing the ideologically untrustworthy trade unions humbled. Beginning in the 1970s, Labour had been transitioning from a party rooted in the working class to a party dominated by the professional and managerial class.
In the new order rising out of the economic reforms instituted by both Labour and National between 1984 and 1993, the administration of the nation would increasingly become the responsibility of the young professionals and managers pouring out of its universities.
The ideas these graduates brought with them into the public service did not take long to congeal into an uncompromisingly radical institutional culture. While this posed no insurmountable problems for Labour and the Left, which had, after all, graduated from university with very similar degrees, the National Party and its right-wing allies, whose voting base was emphatically socially conservative, was soon confronted with a very big problem.
A problem which, as the years turned into decades, showed no sign of shrinking.
The willingness of the professional and managerial class to go along with the economic elements of neoliberalism lulled the right into a false sense of security. What conservatives took some time to fully appreciate was that neoliberal economics and identity politics are mutually reinforcing, and that the social and cultural consequences of their volatile combination acts like Kryptonite upon the nation’s social cohesion.
Like the working class before it, the professional and managerial class has acquired sufficient institutional power to materially influence the state’s economic, political and cultural trajectory.
Increasingly, its power base, the core public service, has begun to see itself — as had the trade unions before it — as an independent constitutional formation.
Essential to the proper functioning of the state; impervious to the authority of transitory parliamentary majorities; the ideologically-driven public service, flanked by the public sector unions (the only big unions left) seems determined to follow its own course.
It will implement only those policies with which it agrees, while not so subtly undermining the sponsors of those it opposes.
One suspects that Ms Willis’ decision to slash the core public sector’s numbers by 9000 is only the beginning.
• Chris Trotter is an Auckland writer and commentator.
