NATHAN REES will announce the most comprehensive overhaul of the public service in decades by merging 160 government agencies into 13 super-departments – but no one will lose their job and he is not planning to axe any of the agencies.

Mr Rees will face accusations he squibbed major reform and is hostage to the unions, who helped get him the job. The Public Service Association was told of the the plan yesterday.

And savings?

Mr Rees said there would be savings, but primarily in the areas of IT, procurement and purchasing goods and services for agencies. The real benefit of the change would be better co-ordinated planning of government policies led by a director-general of each super-department. He will not cut back his cabinet in the wake of the changes.

Don’t you believe it. These savings will be swamped by the costs of co-ordination (more meetings, slower approval processes etc). The idea of economies of scale is largely a myth and the planning problem is largely a political problem i.e. stupid politicians,

The proposal itself is quite silly. The NSW Government proposes a ’single mandate’, which is just another description for a joint commonwealth-state effort. There is no rationale for a joint effort other than it keeps the NSW Government in the game, at a time when 78 per cent of voters want it out of the way. The voters recognise that the NSW Government is the problem not the solution (to paraphrase Ronald Reagan). A joint effort would ensure more bureaucracy, more red tape, more blame shifting – all the stuff that has helped to cripple the system so far.

What’s worse is that the ’single mandate’ idea doesn’t solve the crisis, it just ducks it (as most NSW Government ’solutions’ do). Beyond getting the NSW Government, and its horrible management, out of the way, the problem requires a lot more funding. That substantial extra funding has to come from patients, taxpayers and the privately insured in some mix or other. That’s the problem the Federal and state governments ought get together on. Pretending otherwise, pretending that it can all be resolved by a change of administrative arrangements, is simply dishonest.

The debate around centralisation / decentralisation can never be fully resolved. Both have benefits and costs. Often the costs from disruption, especially in the short-term far outweigh any benefits. The same is true of mergers.

But usually those who propose these restructures, mergers etc are not so much interested in the actual outcomes as the proposed outcomes. Boards like to suggest that there will be big savings (increases in shareholder value) from mergers which will result from ‘operational efficiencies’.

Now the moribund and outrageously incompetent Rees NSW Government is about to play the ‘proposed outcomes’ card in its desperate effort to come up with a credible Budget document:

A CHAINSAW is hanging over the NSW public sector with the State Government considering a plan to cut government agencies from 102 to 12.

Oh yes a ‘chainsaw- – makes it sound like there are a lot of savings on offer from this ‘historic’ restructure. Be sceptical, we’ve heard it all before.

Ms Tebbutt was also reported to have said she would take on the role (as Premier) only if Labor by that stage had turned its fortunes around in the polls and was in a position of being able to win a 2011 election.

Why would the ALP need a new Premier if it had already turned its fortunes around? And why doesn’t Carmel think she’s the person to do it?

THE CBD Metro will run as much as 87 per cent empty during the height of the morning rush hour when it opens in 2015, the Transport Minister, David Campbell, has conceded.

Campbell must be one of the dopiest Ministers in a very, very ordinary front bench.

Part of the reason for that is that for the most part they are dull, unintelligent and uninspiring people. But perhaps even more importantly they have nothing of substance to say. They are a strategy-free zone. The NSW Government is directionless. They stagger from snafu to snafu. The health system is cutting back on operations and can’t seem to pay its grocery bills ontime. It now charges private hospital patients for blood. The public transport system in Sydney is a joke. The roads are clogged. Railcorp is blighted by corruption as well as bad service and terrible planning.  The NSW economy is going down the toilet. We are growing used to major electricity blackouts in the CBD. So much for the global city.

The media brings a stream of this sort of bad news every week if not every day. No amount of clever media training is going to convince the electorate that NSW is somehow back on track. It’s not and it won’t be under this government, unless they decide to bite the bullet and govern rather than simply media manage.

Instead of fixing the policy problem, NSW Ministers typically revert to announcements (that are reversed or abandoned shortly after the next election) or to weather report type media performances giving updates on services which would be better handled by some bright thirty something in the department’s corporate affairs area. Why NSW Ministers and their advisers think that saturation coverage of message mumbling ALP nobodies is going to boost the Government’s standing in the electorate is beyond me. Less is more in media performance, you should appear for a reason better than just getting more airtime.

They need content. They need real policy, not just cheery announcements in glossy brochures. But none of the NSW front bench has shown any capacity for serious policy-making. Other state labor governments, for reasons I don’t understand, seem to be much better, for the most part, at strategy and policy-making than NSW.

When Wedderburn is doing the media training, he should make sure there is a big sign prominently placed at the front of the room which reads “It’s the content, stupid”.