Our elected representatives are being worryingly complacent about the Public Service Bill, writes Tony Burton, but it’s part of a trend that should concern them. Public management systems determine what really happens when governments make policy decisions. It’s the boring, process-between-bureaucrats bit, of issues like education and health. Despite the Public Service Bill proposing to … Read more
The government’s extraordinary measures to halt Covid-19 and support the economy have had extraordinary public support. Tony Burton argues that the hard choices about who pays for it will be far less popular. I have lived with a skeleton since the lockdown. It’s white and shiny and takes up half the space in my living … Read more
A monument to Winston Peters and Think Big projects would both boost the economy, but Argentina learned the hard way they can also impoverish a nation, writes Tony Burton. Everyone who loves New Zealand should visit Argentina. There are more similarities than you might think – large areas of wild natural beauty combined with agricultural … Read more
Britain’s supreme court has unanimously slapped down Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament. It’s just the latest in the disaster zone that is UK politics, and Tony Burton reckons New Zealanders have good cause to feel smug. Just when you thought Brexit could not get more weird, it did. It is hard to exaggerate … Read more
The prime minister of Britain neatly fits the description of a ‘sneaky fucker’, writes Tony Burton Boris Johnson is a sneaky fucker. I mean that in the technical sense. The term is attributed to evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith to describe the male deer who trick their way into the dominant male’s harem rather than … Read more
When is being unemployed not unemployed? A true measure would show more teens are without jobs than people who have supposedly ‘retired’, writes former Treasury senior staffer Tony Burton. Many New Zealanders feel government is not meeting the needs of the long-term unemployed. Who counts as unemployed remains an issue: A third of your taxes … Read more
The review of the 2018 census backs up his experience that Statistics New Zealand is a monster with a small but distant brain, argues Tony Burton, a former senior official at Treasury After the 2011 Canterbury earthquake Statistics New Zealand’s Christchurch office was red stickered, declared too dangerous to enter. This may not sound important … Read more
When random attacks are only a moment’s inattention away, government officials learn to watch their step when committing anything to the written record, writes Tony Burton. My guess is that even those who follow politics will struggle to remember the kerfuffle when a 2011 Official Information Act (OIA) request found an email ‘from Treasury’ that … Read more
Public service chief executives are now more interested in making their mark than providing government ministers with decent advice – and it’s having disastrous consequences, a former senior Treasury official writes. Sometimes on a Tuesday morning you may hear a low, vaguely rhythmic rumble coming from a Treasury meeting room. A handful of its middle-aged … Read more