Familiar faces into the fray

The government’s new consultants and advisers have decades of experience between them, but do they also come with vested interests?

- Danyl McLauchlan

One of the government's election pledges is to reduce public service spending on consultants and contractors by $400 million a year.

This is probably why David Seymour has publicly mused about reducing the cost of school lunches: the Ministry of Education contracts out the entire programme at a grand sum of $323m, a large proportion of the $1.2 billion the core public service spent on contractors and consultants during 2022-23.

Some of the first casualties of the cutbacks have been the business consultancies: why should public agencies pay PwC or EY millions of dollars to spout incomprehensible jargon about agile backend fungibility when the Prime Minister provides this service for free?

But as one door into the Crown accounts closes, another opens: Wellington is now a welcoming and lucrative place for former National Party cabinet ministers. In the past few weeks, Simon Bridges has been appointed chair of Waka Kotahi the New Zealand Transport Agency and Murray McCully is leading a review of the Ministry of Education's management of school property, after allegations of a multi-billion-dollar cost escalation in its building and maintenance pipeline.

Sir Bill English is about to deliver a review of Kainga Ora,Roger Sowry is looking into KiwiRail's interisland service and Steven Joyce is advising Treasury on the design of the government's new infrastructure agency, at a rate of $4000 a day, which would cash out at just over a million dollars a year - except that his payment is prudently capped at a mere $40,000 for the current scope of work.

Surely, it's only a matter of time before Sir John Key is hired as media spokesman and paid a handsome sum to lean against the podium in the Beehive theatrette and reassure the nation that he's relaxed about everything.