https://www.pundit.co.nz/content/in-praise-of-public-servants

". . .Steven Joyce, National’s campaign manager, must have thought he
had Labour out cold when he claimed that its spending plans announced
during the election were enormous and unsustainable. He proved to be
very wrong, as economists – of a variety of political persuasions –
have said. Indeed Joyce’s claims bounced back on him, for the public’s conclusion was that Labour had a credible fiscal program. (Labour
subsequently lost the advantage by its dreadful presentation of its
tax policies.)

What intrigued me was that this was a very different Joyce from the
Minister of Finance I saw at a briefing on the Treasury’s Pre-election
Economic and Fiscal Update. He was in command of the material and
easily dealt with journalists’ questions. Yet a fortnight later he was
flailing around like – er, um – a politician. What had happened?

Part of the explanation is that the column’s opening paragraphs
followed standard journalistic conventions and focused only on the
politician. In actuality each is surrounded by a team. In the case of
the Minister of Finance he (or she) is in constant dialogue with the
public servants in the Treasury. However, the constitutional
convention is that during an election campaign the officials withdraw
and the politician becomes more dependent on a small personal office
team.

If the minister is lucky or shrewd, some in this office are very good.
(Take H2 – Heather Simpson – in Helen Clark’s office; Wayne Eagleson
played a similar role in John Key’s.) But often many in the offices
are politically ambitious time servers, as average as the politicians
they serve and are not nearly as experienced or competent as officials
in the ministries.

I assume one of them did the calculation of Labour’s spending plans
for Joyce; you don’t think he did it himself do you? He seized on it
believing that it must be true since politicians tend to think the
worst of their opponents. The projection was certainly not done by an
expert team of officials.

A documented example is that when Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer
announced he would halve unemployment, economists were astonished,
thinking that the Treasury knew something they did not. They asked for
the officials’ papers. There were none. Someone in the PM’s office,
presumably bereft of any economic understanding, had made the claim
up; the PM had innocently adopted it. . . . "

So there you have it - basic incompetence; Steven Joyce has as little
economic or accounting knowledge as Geoffrey Palmer had . . . So
much nicer than calling him incompetent, isn't it?

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