Government's back room cuts backfire

The Minister of Foreign Affairs' drive to cut out back room functions and provide more frontline services is once again backfiring with his own colleagues now calling for a rethink on hiring outside consultants, Labour's Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Maryan Street says.

"In the process of a large internal restructuring programme, the Minister has exchanged the advice of capable career diplomats and public servants for that of gold-plated consultants, throwing the consultants' budget for 2010-11 out by $2.7 million.

"The Ministry budgeted $7.1 million for advice from consultants over the 12 months but spent $9.8 million instead. Human Resource consultants alone were paid in two instances $150,000 for work budgeted at $30,000, and $100,000 for work budgeted at $80,700," Maryan Street said.

"Now the Minister's own Cabinet colleagues are taking him to task, criticising a report on the future of diplomacy, carried out by a private Wellington consultancy firm, for being bogged down in minutiae.

"Mr McCully is said to be disappointed because he wanted to get efficiency gains in back office functions. Expenditure on Human Resources consultants running over budget is a classic case of in-house, backroom expertise being sacrificed for expensive external consultants.

"It shows the Minister is not watching his budget closely enough and is sacrificing already existing expertise for his belief that the private sector can do it better.

"Perhaps if Mr McCully looked a little more closely at the skills existing in the Ministry, he might not need to indulge in this consultancy binge which is causing his budget to blow out," said Maryan Street.

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