Lawyers are revolting - what's new, do I hear you say? - over the expansion of the Public Defence Service to handle up to 50% of criminal legal aid cases. It's a move that has come out of the report into the legal aid system by Dame Margaret Bazley.
The welfare sector is up in arms over intentions by the Government to act upon the recommendations of the Welfare Working Group, making the issue an election platform.
In the background the deliberations of the Tax Working Group, the Savings Working Group and Taskforce 2025 (aimed at lowering the income gap between this country and Australia) are quietly simmering.
And amid it all there has been a flurry of "noise" about a chap called John Whitehead. Top public servant, head of the Treasury, in fact.
Yesterday was his last day at the office. He's off to a two-year stint as an executive director of the World Bank in Washington DC. Another successful Kiwi export.
But he began life in this country as an import: the 6-year-old son of 10 Poms, a working-class family from somewhere near Manchester. His father was a rubber worker at Skellerup, his mother did part-time cleaning to help pay the bills in their Christchurch state house.
From his schooling he went on to Canterbury University, where he studied commerce, economics and mathematics, emerging with a bachelor of science degree in maths and a master of commerce degree with first-class honours in economics. He joined the Treasury in 1982 and worked his way up the ranks, interrupted by a spell in prime minister David Lange's office - "I was sort of the go-between between David and Roger [Douglas]," he recently told The New Zealand Herald - and spent four years as economic counsellor in the New Zealand High Commission in London.
He was appointed secretary to the Treasury in 2003 - one of the most influential public service positions - and as such has served under Labour and National governments since.
Distinguished, softly spoken, considered, a man of faith, big of brain, the very model of a modern major public service leader. And the expression of so many things this country has in the past treasured: the value of education, the equality of opportunity for all, the work ethic and hard-headed intellectual edge laced with humanity and compassion.
Mr Whitehead has been criticised for being a proselyte for a department long-heralded as ideologically hardline; and likewise too ambivalent or soft in his approach to the same. It rather suggests he got the fine balance to be performed in the public service about right: working with the government of the day, but also being able and prepared to deliver frank, robust and, crucially, independent advice.
Unfortunately, and one desperately hopes to be wrong about this, Mr Whitehead may be one of a slowly but surely disappearing breed. The prevailing wisdom of the Government - and indeed that of Mr Whitehead himself - is that the public sector remains too large a portion of the economy.
Just yesterday, to add to their already accomplished public sector cuts, Finance Minister Bill English and State Services Minister Tony Ryall announced a proposal to axe or merge a number of public sector agencies.
They may be quite right, but we shouldn't imagine there will not be consequences. At the weekend, for example, a newspaper article revealed details of $55 million that has been set aside for finance policy advice over the next year.
Critics are already saying that, as the state sector cuts bite, private sector consultants will be brought in to fill the gaps.
There are, of course, advantages to going outside the institutional parameters of state departments for advice: circumventing established "organisational" biases, for instance; or selecting talents offering different qualities to bring fresh insights to difficult issues.
What was once an occasional phenomenon has become almost the norm - all those "working groups" with their hand-picked memberships. But there are also perils in this approach. Among the most critical of these is the potential loss of that robust independence of advice, protected, encouraged, enhanced by the constitutional separation of powers between the Government and the executive: the voices that dare to raise themselves above a perceived partisan position and say, "Now hang on a minute, mate!" - without fear of their livelihoods being imperilled.
Expensive consultants, on the other hand, might be chosen precisely on the basis of the views they hold, and the anticipated results of the application of those views to the set of conundrums at hand.
Problem-solving as self-fulfilling profligacy?
De facto, as the neutral, professional public service loses force and favour to cadres of mercenary consultants, we march towards a front line in which information and policy advice is more likely to be ideologically loaded.
Which is why it is regrettable to see the back of Mr Whitehead and, increasingly one suspects, many others of his ilk.
- Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) of the Otago Daily Times.
