Govt papering over its inability to turn words into action

If I had a hammer, I’d build some mental health beds, I’d build some low-cost housing, all over this land...

But I’m not in charge of New Zealand. And it turns out that those who are don’t have a hammer. In fact, they have no tools at all.

They also have no carpenters, no tradesmen (or tradeswomen or anything in between) and no materials to build with. Since the demise of the Department of Public Works they have had no operational arm at all. So like the song and the Government itself says, all its plans are wishful thinking — aspirational, as the Government would have it.

The ability of a government to carry out its own work is not necessarily a game-changer. With the right skills of arranging for others to carry out what is required, together with proper project management and monitoring of work done, government hopes and dreams can still happen.

But the Government has a different approach to its lack of any carrying-out-plans function. It is to bury the issue with paperwork.

We now have a never-ending series of reports and proposals and so-called business cases. We have erudite and not so erudite people opining on how useful the proposals could be if they were carried out. We have consultations on the suggested possible, maybe going-to-be-done activities. Indeed, the consultations etc have become the so-called workstream of many government employees (these are called mahi rather than work, to show that we are being culturally inclusive, and the line between doing work and the work of preparing for the doing is blurred).

The communications teams of each political office and government department grow ever more populous, and produce ever more press releases and advertisements for proposed but as yet not being done Government activity. Meetings are held to share the mahi plans and to show which parts of the consultation processes have been reached. All of this has masked the inescapable fact that nothing is actually being done.

Recently, we heard that despite $235million being allocated in the 2019 Budget for mental health beds and refurbishment, barely 0.2% of that amount has been spent. This was news to Health Minister Andrew Little. It appears it escaped anyone’s attention that nothing was happening with this spending, or in fact lack of spending.

"I think it is timely to do a stocktake and find out exactly how decisions have been made, where we’re at and how far we have to go ... " he said. Now he has called for a report into the problem.

A parallel to this sorry tale is being played out in social housing. More and more money is being spent to house those without a home, including on motel rooms which have been attracting the attention of police for all the wrong reasons. But very little is being done to create new housing.

When the Labour Government first came into office it could have been forgiven for not understanding that it has no hammers etc. But that is heading for four years ago now. And rather than acknowledge the lack of operational capacity the spin machine has gone into overdrive trying to explain and justify the lack of progress on changing what needs to be changed.

There are things the Government can do. We could make it easy for employers to arrange staff to carry out what the Government wants to be done, be they staff from New Zealand or overseas. We could have some of the newly appointed communications people out and about listening, looking and reporting back rather than concentrating on imagining what the Government wants the world to look like and describing a fictional world.

And it could reflect that the people who are doing the actual building and health delivery etc can’t do their work from home. Maybe a higher proportion of government employees should be those who have to go out to work.

We know Minister Little is prepared to make bold and useful decisions. After all, he is sorting out the health boards, essentially by taking them into a more coherent central model.

(It must have been frustrating to keep up the nightly spin about Covid only to find out the Government does not have the ability at present to carry out anything through the health boards reliably either).

In the meantime, the Government could practise transparent and good administrative skills by giving us reliable and timely information about what risks are out there, who is being tested, what is happening with the orderly vaccination of the population. It could tell us what it is doing about lack of testing and vaccinations of border workers and vulnerable people, and try to keep its story the same between ministers and the director-general of health. If the Government can’t control what is done, surely it can at least share the true situation with us.

If I had a vaccine, I’d vaccinate the nurses, I’d vaccinate the elderly, all over this land ... If only I could carry out a plan in an orderly fashion.

• Hilary Calvert is an Otago regional councillor, a former MP and former Dunedin city councillor.