Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last month I led the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit on a committee visit to Fiji and New Zealand. While the committee will produce a report of this trip, I want to speak about New Zealand's approach to public sector management, which I think we can benefit from in Australia. For most people, public sector management is not a particularly interesting topic, and promising better public services is something it seems every government does, which I am sure that most people routinely view with scepticism. However, I was extremely impressed by the reform agenda that New Zealand is pursuing in its public sector, and it was very clear that they are managing things much better and more efficiently than we are in Australia.

There are four separate areas I would like to focus on. The first is better public services. In 2012, the New Zealand government set 10 challenging goals for its public services: (1) reducing long-term welfare dependence; (2) increasing participation in early childhood education; (3) increasing infant immunisation and reducing the incidence of rheumatic fever; (4) reducing the number of children experiencing physical abuse; (5) and (6) increasing the proportion of young adults with specific minimum education qualifications; (7) reducing the rates of total crime, violent crime and youth crime; (8) reducing the re-offending rate; (9) reducing the cost to business from dealing with the government; and (10) moving more of the public's transactions with government on-line in a digital environment.

The important thing about these goals is they are not just aspirational, and they are not easy to achieve. The government and agency chief executives are jointly accountable for achieving results. Metrics for each are regularly published and publicly available, and everyone can see whether the outcomes are on track or need attention. This is a simple reform, but it has a clarity and a sense of purpose. Many of these goals stretch across multiple government agencies, and there is a strong focus on creating a culture where state services leaders take ownership of the reforms, focus on building customer-focused agencies and collaborate across agency boundaries. The result has been what the State Services Commission of New Zealand, which plays a key role in delivering these results, has called the New Zealand public sector's 'biggest transformation in a generation'.

The second major reform, which supports the first, is the Performance Improvement Framework. Known colloquially in New Zealand and pronounced as 'the pif', the original idea came from the capability reviews in the UK but has been improved on by New Zealand so that the PIF is forward looking and involves continuous improvement. It is a review of the agencies' fitness for purpose today and for the future, looking at the current state of an agency, how well-placed it is to deal with the issues that confront it in the medium-term future and the areas where the agency needs to make improvements. We found there was widespread support for the PIF process in the New Zealand parliament, from agency heads and from private sector firms involved in public sector governance.

The third major reform I would like to draw to the attention of the House is the way they use data in New Zealand. Statistics New Zealand is working to integrate different data sources to form insights the government needs to improve social and economic outcomes. For example, the Ministry of Education is already developing population projections, building consent data and school enrolment data to work out where new schools would go. By using geospatial population and traffic information, it is possible to work out the best place for a school or hospital so it will be of most benefit to the community as well as cut travel time to get to those places.

I am aware that both the New South Wales government and the Victorian government have looked very closely at a number of these public sector reforms in New Zealand.

The New Zealand approach is very different from the one in the Australian Public Service. New Zealand has moved away from a rules based approach to a principle and results based approach. I think that is a better approach and I think it is something that we should do in Australia. I encourage members of parliament with an interest in better public services to look at the experience in New Zealand. In my view, they do it much better than we do and we could learn a lot from those three reforms.