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Friday, April 5, 2024

David Farrar: Which govt departments have grown the most?

 

There has been a 34% increase over six years in the size of the public service, in terms of EFTS. But not all agencies have grown by the same proportion. Here are the 10 with the largest relative increases between 2017 and 2023.

1. Pacific Peoples 269%

2. Environment 189%

3. Transport 101%

4. MBIE 87%

5. Statistics 85%

6. Women 78%

7. Public Service Cmsn 74%

8. Culture & Heritage 68%

9. Defence 65%

10. Education 64%

So 10 departments have had staff increases of greater than 64%. Amazing

By absolute growth we have:

1. MBIE 2,917

2. Social Development 2,277

3. Education 1,679

4. Oranga Tamariki 1,340

5. MPI 1,300

6. Justice 1,122

7. Corrections 1,073

8. Statistics 779

9. Environment 661

10. Internal Affairs 597

David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry, I don't recognize any of those departments as we have been indoctrinated with the artificial Maori name.

What do those people do all day ?
Email each other with nah mehee greetings to arrange a meetings, which all start with a karakia, nod in agreement with group think, then go back to their office and do and achieve absolutely nothing?

Get a life - get some job satisfaction- join the real world where your get paid for producing real products and services.

Kay O'Lacey said...

Notably, the only correlation to be deduced is that more staff equals poorer delivery. Have any departments actually managed to trim staff numbers? If so people heading those should be granted knighthoods and promptly appointed to the task of 'right-sizing' these bloated entities, monstrous wasters of taxpayers money that they are.

Anonymous said...

When I worked for RNZ commercial back in the 70s and 80s we had a head office in Wellington of around 600 people who administered 40 commercial stations. These 600 were mainly in Auroa House on the Terrace. The more admin staff we had, personnel, finance, property, training planning, technical etc required even more people and money to "care" and administer them.
When SOEs were established and the commercial arm of RNZ was sold off all the admin tasks etc were administered locally at the 40 individual stations without increasing personnel and costs. Of course the head office shrunk to just a handful of people and costs were slashed accordingly saving millions.
Lesson learned, the bigger the bureaucracy the more personnel were needed to run it. The same parallel can be drawn with every government department .