Is our public service worth K7 billion?

Editorial

THE public service is a vital mechanism of government.
As well as being staffed, funded properly and heard out by politicians, it needs as much public scrutiny as possible.
And that is the concern raised by Chief Secretary Isaac Lupari on the total cost of operating the public service.
The cost is said to be as high as K7 billion a year, with almost K4 billion alone spent on wages and salaries.
This issue has been raised before with discussions held and decisions made to bring this figure down.
A public service is a service provided by the government to people either directly (through the public sector) or by financing private provision of services.
Even the prime minister said the civil service was too big and would be downsized but it seems nothing’s happened so far.
But let us be realistic. The excessive public expenditure cannot be contained given the continued demand for provision of public sector services in the country that is fatefully characterised by incompetence that is becoming more rooted.
The country is at a crossroads in terms of transformation to boldly deal with a public service system such as public healthcare, education, transportation and other public sector delivery systems to eradicate unproductive bureaucracy.
The state of the public service is an important question for the country.
Many say if it stops functioning, whatever plans the Government has will never be achieved.
And it is only fair that those entrusted to be serving the people through the various roles they play should do so professionally. When you compare the government pay in PNG and what one can gets in the private sector, PNG is better than many other countries.
In other countries, the government often struggles to attract good people because the private sector normally pays better.
And so we ask, how much revenue does the country generate a year to pay K7 billion a year to the civil service?
Indeed, what do the people or the country get in return?
Some performance standards should be applied.
It’s easy to misrepresent a slow-moving, risk-averse bureaucrat status, but frankly, smart official advice is essential to our system of government.
Nowadays, an essential issue to be analysed in depth is the relationship between the productive efficiency of the public sector and the potential budgetary savings associated with its improvement. But the challenges will be different and broader now.
It’s true that that’s a lot of duplication and for a developing country such as PNG, the government can perhaps start anew and look at our needs in a really clinical and surgical way.
We all want everything but can we afford it? Obviously not.
We should start modestly, prioritising the critical areas and building from there, for example, education, health and planning.
There is a need to build new and sustain new critical skills for running modern public services across the public sector so in future it will have to be more efficient, skilled, capable and more accountable for delivery and to focus on outcome not process.