John. Go on. Pick me. Please. You know you want to.
I'd be great in the new super ministry or doing my bit to help you with your 10 challenging results for the public sector to achieve in the next three to five years.
I love a challenge and fear of failure won't hold me back.
As those important people who wrote the Better Public Services Advisory Group report say, chief executives and their ministers will have to be able to "effectively manage risk and distinguish those low-risk environments from areas where a willingness to provide" room to fail "is critical to fostering a culture of innovation". ICCI (pronounced icky, for the sake of memorising it) will be my mantra for my state employee behaviour - it stands for integrity, innovation and continuous improvement.
I note that I will not be a public servant. That term is no longer cool. It suggests brown cardies and someone who might be a little bit boring, but actually understands their role is to serve the public.
As well as delivering on my more "traditional vertical responsibilities" (being an upstanding sort of sheila), I am happy to be like the chief executives in the sector and "reorient" myself to "horizontal considerations". I have always fancied a bit of a lie-down, particularly in the afternoons. I put that down to my Italian ancestry.
Actually, John, if you had possessed the foresight to have me on board before you made your announcements last week, I could have arranged an accompanying trumpet voluntary and dancing in the streets.
Organising such things would have taken my mind off any unnecessary criticism of your laudable "challenging results" and stopped me wondering out loud whether these things were actually possible for the public sector, even at its lean-thinking best.
Reducing long-term welfare dependency (we don't yet know by how much) is presumably only properly possible (you could just cruelly slash access and leave people to fend for themselves) if you can get people into jobs. Are there jobs, and if not, is it the public sector's job to produce them?
I would not have been tempted to ask if there would be any point to boosting numbers with NCEA level 2 or similar, or improving the skill level of the workforce, if there aren't jobs.
Nor would I have gasped at the notion that "comprehensive cross-agency action" might reduce the rates of total crime, violent crime and youth crime and reduce re-offending.
I wouldn't have blinked an eye at the proposal to increase infant immunisation rates. I wouldn't ask why more money and effort is being spent on this, with it sitting at 92% now after several years' push.
I would not say that while a higher rate might help prevent some epidemics, figures on hospital admissions for children with a "social gradient" in the years 2006-10 show that vaccine-preventable diseases were 21st on the list of medical conditions - about 82 a year compared with 5322 for gastroenteritis, 5245 for acute bronciolitis, 4806 for asthma, 3778 for acute upper respiratory infections, 3527 for site-unspecified viral infections and 3039 for skin infections.
(The figures I am referring to did not include admissions as a result of injuries.)
I wouldn't wet-blanketly say you don't need to be a medical expert to work out that poor living conditions or poverty are likely to have played a huge part in many of the "top" illnesses.
Instead, I will concentrate on talking about other, happier, things.
Well, I think they are happy things. It is hard to tell.
I will speak confidently about best-sourcing and market testing and not even think of calling it privatisation or wondering how many redundant public servants will come back to make a financial killing as consultants. I won't worry about old-fashioned things like loyalty and institutional memory being lost or wonder about whether contractors actually care about the long term.
I may even speak of hard and soft-wired sector boards. I have no idea what they are, but I believe the advisory group when they tell me the system will "get better traction on results if accountabilities are more clearly defined and all parties have some serious 'skin in the game"'.
I will try not to laugh out loud at the jargon-crazy advisory group's suggestion chief executives should be required to "proactively make plain English information available to citizens and businesses and actively seek feedback on services".
However, I may be moved to point out, John, that challenging result 10: "New Zealanders can complete their transactions with government easily in a digital environment" is probably unnecessary.
Don't New Zealanders already readily complete many transactions with government by using well-understood finger gestures?
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
