John Key - Video Journal 32 on capping the bureaucracy

John starts off with thanks to his growing community of supporters on Facebook and then turns to today's major policy speech on curbing the growth of bureaucracy. Under the new policy, National would freeze the current level of "core bureaucrat" employment while it investigates ways to do the same work more efficiently at a lower cost. This could save the taxpayer around half a billion dollars over three years without damaging the delivery of services.

"The fastest growing sector in the economy since 2000 has not been agriculture, it has not been retail trade, transport, manufacturing, personal services, or finance and business services. No, the fastest growing sector in the economy since 2000 has been government administration.

"We are not going to reduce the number of front-line staff. Let me make this absolutely clear -- under National the numbers of doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, police and other front-line staff will grow.

"I firmly believe we have enough bureaucrats to do the job already and that the priority for resources in the state sector is the delivery of front-line services.

"And by keeping a lid on the size of the bureaucracy, we will, over time, restore a sensible balance between the number of state employees who are giving advice to the government and the number who are delivering front-line services.

"When it comes to the bureaucracy, it is clear that Labour has spent eight years doing the same with more. It's high time we started doing more with the same."

http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=QRJIpt7dC88