Former University of South Pacific Professor Emeritus Crosbie Walsh recently visited Fiji to interview various permanent secretaries and ministers on how the country is achieving its goals towards a better Fiji. His main objective is to maintain reasonable discussion on his blog site. This is to give some sort of exposure to the mainstream Australian and New Zealand media, so they get a better balanced perspective on the developments in Fiji. Professor Walsh now lives in New Zealand. He has been interviewed by both the Australian and New Zealand media and will feature on a panel discussion with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation next month.

Below is the full extract of his interview with the Permanent Secretary for the Public Service , Parmesh Chand.

PROF CROSBIE: Tell me anything that would be usual?
MR CHAND: Well the Public Sector Reforms is of course encompassing a whole broader area. It involves finance reforms, labour reforms, public enterprise reforms and civil service reforms. Civil Service Reforms is of course is about bulk of the public sector reforms. Anybody who talks about the Public Sector always points a finger at civil service reforms but public sector as such is broader than the civil service. It covers the quasi, statutory and is much more than the civil service. But I'm more involved in the civil service reforms although I was involved in the public sector reforms before as CEO Public Enterprise but now I'm involved in the Civil Service Reforms which focuses much more than numbers. It focuses on organizational reform, it focuses on human resource, manpower development or talent development. It also focuses on bringing about efficiencies, so in the area of organizational reform we are looking at how best some of the entities within government can go through a process through commercialization, corporatized or outsourcing and a lot is happening already on that. You know that water is corporatized now and government shipping services has been outsourced to the navy. Nothing much will change in government shipping services staffing and structure but the navy has been brought on top to improve their work culture and to improve the efficiencies in maritime shipping so they need to be given a jolt.

Then there's the Government Supplies - it is being reformed and the manner in which government supplies was looked at here. Government Supplies was a big sum here where it involved government buying, procuring staff and warehousing it. At one stage government started opening stalls to make parts of those bigger items to be sold. So government was running full fledged government hardware stalls around the country.

The reform involves closing all that down, closing the warehousing concept of government supplies down and bringing it purely into a procurement mode where it becomes secretariat to the tenders board. It just oversees the supplies and store manual procurement instructions and ensures that proper processors have been followed by respective departments and ministries in procuring supplies. We will not store them anywhere because that has been the hard part of the abuse before and many of it would be just-in-time delivery.

So it will become an entity reduced from the size of 140 to only 40,then government was running its own printery that will go. It has already been decided that it be sold and the final area is developing a good outsourcing policy. Once we have a good outsourcing policy developed for contracting out than a lot of things will fall in to place. By way of how the government will operate in terms of projects and infrastructure, the whole modality will shift from it being a hardware and software component of infrastructure to only doing the design or even design would be contracted out maintaining quality and standards of supervision and seeing how best the policy objectives are being met. So the delivery of the infrastructure or product will be left in the hands of the private sector.

PROF CROSBIE: To what extent is this being influenced by IMF (International Monetary Fund)?
MR CHAND: No, it has always been our thinking. It is now that we find it easier to implement, IMF is not driving this. IMF is has not even come to the stage of reforms yet and they cannot impose anything at the moment unless they come up with a package of assistance.

PROF CROSBIE: But they are more likely to come up with a package of assistance with you doing these sorts of things? MR CHAND: It's possible that they might because we see that if maintenance of highways and roads is outsourced, why do we have to maintain PWD (Public Works Department) for that if we are already outsourcing maintenance work in buildings. Why do we have to have a maintenance section in PWD.

PROF CROSBIE: One factor is from this exercise is the possibility for minor corruption to disappear?
MR CHAND: The other thing is that it will reduce the burden of hiring more staff if we hire more staff with it comes more office space and more liabilities by way of their superannuation, their PAYE, their insurance welfare and grievance procedures to worry about and all that so will get rid of most of that and retain a group of professionals in government.

PROF CROSBIE: Has this been done simultaneously or is this sort of a road map within a road map?
MR CHAND: There ought to be a road map within a roadmap but at the moment it is a free for all and we are allowing it to find its own feet. The Outsourcing Policy that I am developing will have a road map we cannot do everything all at once because there will be social implications. Out of this we have to look at avenues for staff participation like we have already outsourced the security and laundry services at the hospitals. The security work went out to the security companies. Some of the security people that were working in government got laid off. But laundry work, at the moment, there is work happening where the former laundry workers or the current laundry workers can form a company and run the laundry on outsourced contract basis for a period of time so they are talking about that at the moment. So some of this work we may be able to outsource to firms formed or companies formed out of staff who are involved in this.

PROF CROSBIE: So that staff who you are making redundant, some of them will be able to start their own companies to handle the kind of work they are doing?
MR CHAND: Yes, but it involves a lot of work. Because firstly, we will pay them redundancy. First they can use that redundancy to form a cash flow of their own company. We require a lot of advice then there is options for some of them to draw funds from the FNPF and buy equity into this company. On their own they may not be able to do it but if we show them the way they may be able to do it. Like the worker participation scheme in the ATS (Air Terminal Services) the ground handling in Nadi is done by a company called ATS which is 51per cent owned by government and 49 per cent owned by the employees. It was a company that was 100 per cent owned by government but government decided to privatise the company.

PROF ROSBIE: This was fairly recently?
MR CHAND: This was 20 years ago, so the workers were given the opportunity through their savings and through their superannuation to buy. And government gifted a part of the company too. So it's now jointly run by the employees and government with a board formed proportionate to the shareholders with government nominees always the chair and government has a say in the appointment of the CEO and how the company is run but by large the workers are also proud to be part of the company. It makes profit and the workers get portion of the dividend and it's upon them how they use it. In the area of Human Resources, we are doing a lot of work in reshaping our scholarship programmes both for in-service and new entrants to the civil service. We spend as much as 27 to 30 million a year on government scholarships but many government scholarships were given in conventional areas like accounting, law, management, economics but the needs of government are not in those areas there's enough of those people

PROF CROSBIE: These were tertiary scholarships?
MR CHAND: Yes, we have stopped giving scholarships in those areas. There is some given but minimal, but now the focus is more on medicine, geo-sciences and veterinary sciences, agricultural sciences, town planning, meteorology and scientist. A lot of work is being done in that area, we also are looking at compulsory induction training for anybody, joining the civil service and later on have compulsory refresher courses for civil servants.

PROF CROSBIE: What happened before?
MR CHAND: There was training but the training was given as though you have joined civil service, you are an expert on civil service and you just fit in. PROF CROSBIE: So you learnt on the job? PS CHAND: Yes, but now we will provide compulsory induction training anybody passing that course will only enter the civil service, like they do in Singapore and Malaysia.

PROF CROSBIE: How much are you consulting with places like Singapore and Malaysia?
MR CHAND: What happens is that we are part of the APO (Asian Productivity Organisation). We don't go and undertake field visits but as part of the involvement in APO training conducted in Asia we seek short stints in public administration in each of those countries that we go to. So if I go to Korea and spend a few days to learn about Korea Public Administration and then get a lot of ideas. If the course is held in Malaysia, we will do the same but we have been planning to go to Singapore. But it got deferred from last year into this year and it's likely to happen this year. To learn about their civil service, their work culture, the performance management system they have and how they implement all that. The other thing we are developing at the moment is developing an integrated Human Resource Database. This database will have strong links with the payroll system because there is a mismatch between the payroll and the staff establishment. So this system will be done by ITC itself and it will be a big exercise. I don't know whether ITC has the capacity to do all that. So that's what's happening with human resources. We will provide training, we will tidy up the human resources side. The other big area is the productivity management. This is an area where we have failed miserably and we continue to lack behind. The government agreed back in 2004-2005 to do away with automatic cost of living adjustments and also to do away with automatic increments and replace all this with implementation of performance based management system, so from 2006 all this stopped of course. Up to 2006 there was this partnership agreement done to give adjustment in salary to across the board on the civil service. But when this government came, they scrapped everything and said if we have agreed to do performance management system lets work on that. But unfortunately not much has happened in the past year. I think much of it is due to the fact that performance management system is new to Fiji and secondly everybody is fearful of the cost so no money gets allocated to this exercise. So the civil service in terms of productivity management we say that you will be rewarded in terms of productivity management if you do this and do that but nobody has received anything. The PS received a bonus which was a one step increment in 2008 but not the rest of the civil service. This is a big area of concern for us because there has to be incentive for staffs. Government is doing a lot of brave things like restructuring, containing the size of the civil service and it is possible that the savings from all that exercise will be deployed to pay them performance monies later on. At the moment it's not upon them. We have got a lot of things right. We have decided on more prudent use, more efficient use of Government properties meaning housing and office space. We have decided that we bid it out to the private sector and that it be commercially rented out and the civil servants who want to live in government quarters would have pay commercial rent and we have a select group of civil servants who are entitled to housing allowance. So that work is underway at the moment some of the house in domain have been spruced up and rented out.

PROF CROSBIE: In other words there are no more housing in relations to a job?
MR CHAND: They'll be no more housing in relation to a job but they will be a housing allowance if a job is of particular necessity and demand and if government agrees so that they be paid a housing allowance, so we are listing at the moment which jobs carry legibility for housing. It will go across the public service. Housing allowance will be paid regardless of your status to anybody whose in the outpost stations and what is an outpost station? It's a station which is a non-urban area with limited provision for housing so we pay them a housing allowance in lieu of that we provide free housing. The other that needs to be looked at is Government may not be able to give a loan as there is no provisions available in the superannuation scheme. Guys from Singapore came to review the superannuation fund and I was the chairman at that time. They said its very absurd that the superannuation fund is not giving more flexible loans to its members to buy a house at the moment. Members can only access 1/3 of their contribution of their housing and this should be liberalized because housing is something everyone needs to have and moreover, it’s not a wasteful expense when people invest in housing it accumulates to wealth. It's a better way of using superannuation. I mean somewhere along the line our allowance together with superannuation funds helps civil servants buy houses.

PROF CROSBIE: When these decisions are made, how are they made, is it around the table?
MR CHAND: Well, we still do a proper process of horizontal coordination and consultation for decisions. There is a policy for a provision prepared and we will take that and a number of ministries are involved in those like for housing there is Lands Department there is PSC involved, there is public works involved so we consult and prepare a paper and present it to Cabinet.

PROF CROSBIE: How are talks with the Unions?
MR CHAND: We have not been consulting them at the moment because the issue is that they are not coming in good faith. Everything they come in is just to one extreme and we would rather consult the employees directly or be mindful of what the implications are on the employees rather than engaging with the Unions, who are in more times than not block to everything we do. Like the other day, we tried to impose a fee for union subscriptions. Unions want government to deduct employees pay roll and give them their subscription so its deducted at source. We have been doing that at $15 a month regardless of what the holding is. We went to union and said look we want a change in this and we want issue the percentage if the union dues are $100,000 a year we want 5 per cent of it that's the figure we plucked up from the air. They all said we are not prepared to take anything than 0 % at the moment. They are paying $15 so they said we'll pay zero per cent so we could see where the logic was coming from. Especially we spent quite a bit of money on inputting the data and if there is an era we have to go back and correct that error. It takes a lot of time and money.

PROF CROSBIE: Why is the union acting like this?
MR CHAND: I think they have to change their mindset to come and be a party to the reforms because the reforms are meaning good things like employee participation. If I involve the unions they will say no no no redundancies. We don't want this and they are not prepared to talk about the second best option. And if the redundancy is an attempt to retrain people in some new area like setting up your company at least you would think they would be a bit more tolerant to that? Yes, they have to now adjust themselves to market their services more for this kinds of things but rather than a straight cut union due deduction, they have to play a more advisory role and be actively involved in reshaping the future of employment in the public service. Case study : Singapore's Trade Unions have a different relationship compared to western partners. So these are some of the reforms it's not all about slashing the numbers of employees in the civil service and getting this much savings it's all about turning around the civil service. Firstly, you would need to have the right type of civil service and secondly, to see what are the competencies of civil service and where we should be involved and thirdly, to get more consistent resources.

PROF CROSBIE: How are travel bans affecting you?
MR CHAND: All the Permanent Secretaries are on travel ban. Any official who accepts a senior appointment in government which is a gazette appointment. They pick up the gazette notice and put you on travel ban. I was a permanent secretary long before the coup. The permanent secretary in the prime minister's office got pushed out. I was one of the two top performing permanent secretaries. The other lady who was my counterpart got appointed by the Ministry of Education and I got selected to go to the Prime Minister's Office and then came the travel ban on me and my family. I'm still on travel ban and New Zealand and Australian Officials will not come to this office to discuss anything. I think they should relax the travel ban on government officials at least. I mean the civil servants are contracted by the Public Service Commission to provide a service. I can understand why the ban is on the key people but I can't see why it comes down to the civil service nor I can't see why it goes to the lower ranks or the rugby? You see Australia runs a leadership programme called PACE and permanent secretaries are in positions of leadership. They lead ministries but they don't invite permanent secretaries. They will send you the invites and if you register your name, they will say no it was not meant for you. I attended a Pacific Island Commissioners Conference of Public Service held at the Solomon Islands and it was funded by the Commonwealth, Australia and New Zealand so they refused to fund us. So we decided to fund ourselves and went and it became obvious that we were being sidelined so the Tongan guy stood up and said look Fiji has got the largest public service out of the pacific island countries and they have paid their way to be here. Why are we excluding them so the Australians and Kiwi's chickened out after that, although they didn't reimburse us anything. Although we didn't want anything but we wanted to be treated properly.

PROF CROSBIE: What about the 55 retirement policy?
MR CHAND: 55 plus is misunderstood a lot both in the civil service as well as outside first it was brought in to do a number of things. Firstly, people 55 and above had recourse to their own superannuation. It was recommended that the make way for the younger people to come, secondly there was enough pool of young people who could be trained through a succession plan and thirdly with older people leaving it gave good opportunities for restructuring with new ideas, new blood and new things. And fourthly if none of this could be done the options based on skills to re-engage them. So there's all that flexibility.