Implementing Better Public Services

Abstract

In March 2012 the Prime Minister announced a set of ten goals or result challenges, and named the ministers who are to be held politically responsible for achievement of each of the results and the specific public sector chief executives with management accountability. This ‘to-do list’ (Key, 2012) was accompanied by the release of the report from a group of four senior public officials and three private sector people known as the Better Public Services Advisory Group, which had provided advice to government in late 2011 on how the public sector should be reconfigured to improve the ‘system’s efficiency and effectiveness – in short to do more and better with less’. The report says that it is the ‘starting point for an ongoing programme of reform over the next five years. The objective is better services for New Zealanders, of a type and at a scale that enables our society and economy to flourish’