The process of shutting down the Productivity Commission was needlessly cruel and disrespectful to its staff, according to the crown entity’s Chairman Ganesh Nana.
Nana gave a closing statement on Wednesday morning, in which he thanked the Commission’s staff who had worked hard to finish research under a cloud of uncertainty.
Staff and leadership only learned the Commission would be shuttered through media reports in November, and no direct contact was made until the letter of expectations on December 19.
“To hear via a public announcement to media that the organisation you work for is to be closed, without even a courtesy heads up beforehand, was incredibly thoughtless and unnecessarily cruel to the Commission’s staff,” he said.
The Commission was also not given the opportunity to discuss the closure and possible options for transferring staff to the new regulation ministry or other economic agencies.
Nana said a ministerial briefing was prepared and he made “repeated requests” to meet with Finance Minister Nicola Willis to discuss how to preserve the finished research and best manage the shut down.
Treasury, which is the monitoring agency for the Commission, has arranged to take over management of the organisation’s website and host its research.
“We had good engagement through Treasury, but we sent numerous requests for a meeting with the Minister. We were open that we didn’t want to contest the decision, that was done”.
Nana said the board wanted to discuss the two key priorities: looking after the now redundant staff and ensuring the Productivity Commission's completed work remained available.
Some staff had expertise in regulation and he wanted to recommend them to ACT leader David Seymour’s new ministry, which is yet to be established.
In a statement, Willis said the coalition Government understands the disappointment of Nana and his colleagues at the disestablishment of the Commission.
“The Government stands by its decision and is confident the Public Service Commission and Treasury have ensured that all employment obligations have been met in the disestablishment of the Commission”.
In 2022, the NZ Herald reported the Productivity Commission had faced a wave of resignations after Ganesh Nana became Chairman in 2021.
An HR consultancy firm was hired to review the situation. It found the transition to the new Chairman went poorly and broader remit from the minister had contributed to the upheaval.
Staff comments to the Herald were highly critical of Nana and the other commissioners’ leadership, the way they treated the staff, and their approach to the research.
On productivity and regulation
In his closing statement on Wednesday, Nana gave the new Government some advice on how to achieve its commitment to lifting productivity and economic growth.
“Bluntly, productivity should not be confused with making more and more stuff. It is the ‘how it is made’ that matters”.
Having more workers, doing longer hours, for less pay, to make more stuff, was not an improvement to productivity, only economic output.
“More critical, and sometimes mischievously, is the conflation of productivity with profitability,” he said.
Reducing costs on businesses, such as by cutting regulations, does not necessarily eliminate those costs and improve productivity across the entire economy.
“The burden of those costs may rather be shifted to another group in our community to be borne by them,” he said.
Pursuing productivity with isolated, short-term measures had not been successful and would not work in the future.
One of the Commission's final pieces of work, Improving Economic Resilience, called for more “cross-silo, long-term investments” which would prepare NZ for future disruptions.
He said productivity policies needed to be connected to other policy areas, such as immigration, access to education and workforce training.
The coalition Government has promised to make changes to both the education and immigration sectors as part of its long-term economic development plan.
Another problem for productivity in New Zealand was that successive governments had targeted too low a level of net debt, he said.
“The fixation with fiscal parameters and fiscal targets is something that has held this country back for a long time … it's a total misunderstanding of the way an economy functions”.
It was important to also consider the state of the real resources and infrastructure in the economy as part of that picture.
“Fiscal targets are another example of those silos that we put ourselves in, [with] a very superficial understanding of economics and productivity”.
29 Comments
Just the corporate way of doing things. The plebs at the coal face are like mushrooms, kept in the dark and lucky to be fed shit. People think Government should be run like a company/corporate, hence we have Luxon at the helm.
Let's celebrate as the public are baying for the blood of lazy bureaucrats, and ruthless culling like this is a welcome change. Remember, it's not people with families and mortgages that are out of a job, they're numbers on a spreadsheet that burdens the taxpayer and deserve to be sacked for "hoodwinking" us into giving them a job.
Nobody is cheering people being made redundant what are you on about? You make a good point that these are all real people and we should all be sensitive to that.
In reality the Commission was not effective and needed to be removed - should have been handled a lot better - that's for sure.
There have been mixed opinions on the worth of the Productivity Commission - not all of them glowing.
Its reports will be remembered by many for being served up to the public in physically large documents - "weighty tomes" was an expression often used. I imagine that few of them would have been read cover-to-cover.
I remember looking at the Commission's report on social services some years back and concluding it was scarcely more than a rubber stamping of Bill English's so-called "social investment" approach - as flawed as that was.
The Productivity Commission had its day. It was never a path-breaking organisation, high-powered think-tank, or anything along those lines. I imagine it will be forgotten pretty quickly. Hopefully, most of the people there will find jobs elsewhere - in more productive roles.
TTP
“More critical, and sometimes mischievously, is the conflation of productivity with profitability,”
Perhaps it's a shame that the media didn't support the work of the The Productivity Commission. Those weighty tomes, if they had been picked up by media, summarized and put in a more digestible form before disseminating to the public, could have served to inform and lift everybody's understanding of the issues. Too, the sentence above, in particular, appears to fly in the face of the ideology of this current Government.
That's silly. It was Murray Sherwin, for most of the journey.
The problem is that economics mis-identifies what is driven, and what is the driver. Reducing EROEI was always going to combine with diminishing returns, to slow, then reverse, 'productivity'.
It's a physics thing. Nothing to do with left, right, or personalities.
What did the productivity commission ever actually achieve? Our productivity is poor and has been worsening.
I'm kind of curious about what the replacement Ministry for Regulation (that name makes me shudder) can achieve. At least they have ministerial status rather than being an outside body that gets ignored.
Agreed, not great, but the political logic is likely that anyone who worked for the commission will never work in government again, and sudden euthanasia will blow over faster than any kind of elaborate process. And one would imagine the redundancy from a government organisation might not be ungenerous.
All that said, I have seen people turn up on Monday morning to a private firm where the doors had been padlocked on Sunday by the receivers. No warning, no money for redundancy and executive management gone AWOL.
But isn't that the essence of innovation: where things that don't work get discarded in favour of different things that allow us to apply what has been learnt?
It certainly beats the approach of keeping on with things that haven't worked - but just do them harder.
It's typical of an ideologically driven approach to policy. It's better not to have evidence provided that demonstrates that your proposed approach is rubbish.
This is a very very slippery slope. This government has tried to repress evidence that counteracts their ideology. They said they didn't want to see regulatory impact statements now they don't want to see Productivity Commission reports. Why?
Remember they have no obligation to act on Productivity Commission reports or Regulatory Impact Statements, but to reject even accepting evidence is alarming.
It moves us further away from a non-partisan approach to government where cross-party support is sought for the benefit of the country.
Worse National leadership in living memory.
"This government has tried to repress evidence that counteracts their ideology." The Coalition still have a very long way to go before they approach the last Govts dis/mis information practices including their team of $55M++
"It moves us further away from a non-partisan approach to government where cross-party support is sought for the benefit of the country. " Surely the 6th Labour Govt set the std by which all others shall be judged... oh, wait
It's hard to know the truth unless you hear it from an actual worker I guess. Sounds like Ganesh Nana's appointment was not without controversy, and there may be some bad blood between him and ministers. Therefore any comments from him may need to be taken with a grain of salt.
I do have sympathy with laid off workers, and I hope that they are supported to apply for other public service vacancies of similar titles.
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