PSA rips Bagrie report

Written By: - Date published: 11:24 am, July 18th, 2008 - 7 comments
Categories: articles, business, public services, workers' rights - Tags: , , , ,

Good piece in the Herald yesterday (and the Dom Post the day before) from PSA national sec Richard Wagstaff critiquing ANZ National chief economist Cameron Bagrie’s woeful report on public sector ‘waste’.

Wagstaff takes aim at the underlying assumptions of the report about ‘productive’ versus ‘non-productive’ public sector spending, then proceeds to rip through some of the more glaring omissions and misleading examples in the report.

One of my favourite examples:

Then there’s the Department of Conservation. According to the report, it’s also “non-productive”.

But where would New Zealand’s tourism industry be if DoC staff weren’t protecting our natural and historic heritage? Of the 2.2 million overseas tourists who visited between March 2006 and March 2007, 668,400 – 30 per cent – visited a National Park maintained by DoC staff.

The West Coast’s five National Parks generate $220 million in tourism activity a year, creating jobs for 1800 “Coasters”. In the North Island, the Whakapapa and Turoa ski fields are also included in a National Park maintained by DoC. They generate more than $45 million a year and create more than 2100 jobs.

Yet ANZ says this is “non-productive”.

You can read the full article here.

7 comments on “PSA rips Bagrie report ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. randal 1
    18 July 2008 at 11:39 am

    oh so what he means is there is no revenue streams from these enterprises in the AnZ portfolio?

  2. Steve Pierson 2
    18 July 2008 at 12:44 pm

    It really was an embarrassingly bad piece of work. You couldnt’ produce it and not think ‘this is crap, look at all the assumptions I’ve made that suit my prejudices’, which is the worst thing you can do when researching (hey, I’ve shown myself what I wanted to find, now I understand the situation better!). If you want to be able to make useful findings, it’s critical that your research isn’t tailored to fit your desired outcomes – you want to know what reality is, not base decisions on a fairytale.

    And it shows a contempt for the media and the rest of the report’s audience that they thought they could produce something as obviously flawed as this and think that people would just take it at face value.

  3. weka 3
    18 July 2008 at 1:18 pm

    It’s good to challenge notions of productive and non-productive, but that isn’t a good example. What’s going to happen to DOC and the conservation estate when we run out of cheap oil and the tourism industry collapses? Do we then chop down the trees to make the parks ‘productive’ again?

    National Parks are productive* in the way that my friend washing her child’s nappies is productive. They support life in ways that some economists can’t see. The point is to redefine how we measure what is important, not to use the same limited tools to measure new things.

    *you know, they do things like produce oxygen, kakapo, quality of life.

  4. coge 4
    18 July 2008 at 1:31 pm

    PSA is just sticking up for it’s members & the Labour Govt. They could hardly be considered non-partisan, could they? Which is what you are accusing the ANZ of.

  5. Matthew Pilott 5
    18 July 2008 at 1:46 pm

    Have you read the report coge, or the PSA counter report? I wouldn’t consider their rebuttal to be specifically partisan, it’s laregly factual.

  6. coge 6
    18 July 2008 at 6:28 pm

    Matthew you can say what you will, but we both know that the PSA will always back the party line, unless there is a National Govt.

  7. Felix 7
    19 July 2008 at 12:06 am

    Coge the issue is not what Matthew says, it’s what the reports say. Which you don’t know. And probably never will.