Bryce Edwards: The Big “consultocrats” debate needs to carry on

A parasitic blight on our democracy? Or a useful and necessary aid to our government departments? Those are two perspectives on the usefulness of the Wellington consultant class that contract to government agencies.

The role of business management consultants took centre stage last week when National’s Christopher Luxon called time on the over-use of “consultocrats” in his state of the nation speech. Luxon pledged to cut the use of contractors by 25 per cent off the $1.7bn that was spent last year by government departments and agencies such as Te Whatu Ora and Waka Kotahi.

Heather du Plessis-Allan: The Nats are onto something by targeting the Government’s consultancy spending

I think the Nats are onto something by targeting the Government’s consultancy spend over the last year.

It is huge, $1.2 billion dollars on record. The year before, it was closer to $900m, so it went up by a third in one year. 

That should've set off alarm bells for anyone in The Beehive, but they just pushed on with it. Such is their attitude, I suspect, to using money.

A lot of this is just a complete waste on projects that have gone absolutely nowhere.

Dr Bryce Edwards: Political Roundup - Time for a big debate about Govt use of business consultants

This week’s bonfire of policy was also a bonfire of cash. The Hipkins-led Government finally ditched the RNZ-TVNZ media merger, but only after wasting about $23m on consultants to design the failed project. Other ditched policies also incurred millions of dollars in business consultancy fees.

Much of this was spent on the “Big Four” management consultants: Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst and Young (EY) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). External contractors have become an increasingly large part of Labour’s public policy-making process. Critics say they are superseding the role of the public service in designing state programmes.

Mike Hosking: What is it that these government consultants do exactly?

Yes, the upset yesterday at the revelation of the Three Waters office space is understandable. Millions spent on leases and hundreds of workers.

For what?

The thing doesn’t even exist. It's like the central health authority's first action being a report with 101 ideas as to what to do about fixing the place. Not a single one of them was original and none of them enacted because they had barely unpacked their lunch boxes.

That's this Government in a nutshell, though.