The Government has hired the international management consultants Cap
Gemini, experts in outsourcing and technology, to help with the “public
service response” to Mr Iemma’s plan for a state plan, announced last
month.
On June 26, Mr Iemma said the Government would prepare a state plan for
the next 10 years, prompting ridicule from the Opposition and media. The
Premier had said: “For me there is only one option – NSW needs a
plan.”
Now, more than 50 of the state’s mandarins – from the director-general
of the Department of Health to the Police Commissioner, Ken Moroney – have been
taken out of their jobs to prepare their views on how this can be achieved.
The Premier told the heads of department in an address on Monday:
“This is the chance for CEOs to make an historic shift in the way we
deliver services.
“I want the state plan to be stitched into the very fabric of
government. I intend it to be the fundamental instrument of public policy in
this state.”
Mr Iemma said he wanted to see “innovation and creativity in
policymaking” and he had “told CEOs and agency heads that new ideas
on how to better deliver services will be rewarded and backed”.
A spokesman for the Premier, Todd Hayward, said the workshop had been
organised by the director-general of the Premier’s Department, Col Gellatly.
“They [Cap Gemini] have run similar workshops with the Department
of Services in Canada,
the UK Ministry of Defence and NATO,” Mr Hayward said.
He would not say how much the consultants were costing, but said they
were funded by “existing budgets of agencies”.
But the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Debnam, said the Government
“just want to be seen to have a plan”.
“I think it’s now a few months before an election, it’s …
completely inappropriate for public servants to be tied up in Labor Party
campaign preparations.”
Mr Iemma said the state plan would be drafted before the end of August.
[Andrew Clennell SMH July 21, 2006]