Blowing the budget | The Jackal

12 Apr 2012

Blowing the budget

Today, the NZ Herald reported:

The Government has defended its rising payments to consultants, saying unexpected events such as earthquakes and finance company collapses required experts that the public sector could not provide.

Documents released under the Official Information Act showed that Treasury and the Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture had tripled their payments to contractors in National's time in government.

Some departments were spending close to a third of their budget on consultants.

More private consultants are required because there is now a shortfall from reducing the amount of public sector workers. In some instances, government departments are having to hire at a premium the very same staff they have just laid off.

This is where National excels, by not properly understanding the effect of their idiotic decisions. They are in fact ideologically blinded by neoliberalism that ends up costing us more with less to show for it.

Despite the obvious incompetency, Bill English does his best to dismiss National's budget blowout:

Finance Minister Bill English said this did not represent a blowout because it was lower than the rate of inflation and similar to the total wage increases for the public sector.

He said the big-spending departments such as Treasury had dealt with earthquake recovery, the collapse of finance companies, and guarantees for large IT projects.

"Those require specialist skills that you wouldn't expect the public service to have. While the public sector has a wide range of skills it doesn't have every skill you need in a pretty volatile world."

Treasury's budget on consultants has increased by 450 per cent since Labour's time in charge.

Mr English said he did not know what the Government had spent in total on consultants, and it was up to individual ministries to provide these figures.

Excuses excuses! Of course they failed to project the increased spending on consultants in the 2011 PREFU. National also sacked thousands of public sector workers to apparently save money, and here is Bill bloody English saying employment costs have increased... what an idiot!

National will just continue to bang on about excessive costs under the last Labour government, while under National, New Zealand has to borrow billions to cover their tax cuts for the wealthy, which will ensure our indebtedness for the foreseeable future.

The financial incompetency of National couldn't be greater.