At a recent dialogue with armed forces personnel, Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad spoke in favour of downsizing the public service. He argued that when he retired in 2003, the establishment was a mere million.
Today it has ballooned by 70 per cent to 1.7 million.
We can easily justify public-service expansion if it grows in tandem with population growth. Surely, we need more public servants to serve an ever-expanding population. And surely there is a limit to what technology can do.
However, over the same period, the population grew by 22 per cent. Evidently, public service expansion has grown thrice more than population growth. Critics have compared the size of Malaysia’s public service unfavourably with that of other countries. That too has fuelled suspicion that the public service is too unwieldly.
There is neither an authoritative benchmark of what constitutes a public service nor of its ideal size. Our definition follows the provision of Article 132 of the Constitution. On this legal definition, the public service comprises the federal public service, state public services including local authorities, education service, health service, judiciary, legal service, police and the armed forces.
It is this interpretation that is the source of the furore over the size of the public service. Other countries are not so inclusive. The United Kingdom, for example, considers only those working in departments that report direct to a minister as its public service.
Accordingly, the two-million-odd employees in its national health and education services are excluded in the UK’s computation of the size of its public service. Similarly, local authorities are large employers. Their workers too do not figure in the UK’s tally of roughly half-a-million public servants. Given this narrow interpretation, the UK’s public servant to population ratio is 1:130 compared with Malaysia’s 1:25.
Likewise, teachers, doctors, and uniformed personnel do not figure in the Australian public service head count. Accounting for only those working in public administration, the ratio of Australian public servant to population comes close to that of the UK. If all government employees are taken into account, then that ratio will shrink to 1:12. This ratio would suggest that the Australian public service is twice as bloated as Malaysia’s!
Let us break down the size of our public service to examine where the fat is, if any. Excluding uniformed personnel, we have roughly 1.3 million public employees. One-third of this are 430,000 teachers housed in 10,200 schools. They serve five million primary and secondary schoolchildren. We need our teachers. Our nation’s future depends greatly on them.
Our medical and health sector takes up another 253,000 personnel scattered across 144 hospitals and over 3,200 health facilities. They comprise 20 per cent of the public service establishment. We cannot downsize them either, without compounding the overcrowding in our medical and health centres. That leaves some 600,000 employees distributed across more than 770 public agencies including 26 federal ministries, 13 state governments and 154 local authorities.
On a public servant to population ratio, the size appears justifiable. More so, the numbers employed in the security, education, health and local government sectors are indexed to international norms.
But Dr Mahathir has a point. With digital-era governance, the public service need not grow endlessly. Digital technology can enable the current numbers to continue to provide the same, if not better, services to meet the ever-burgeoning size of the population. Indeed, the world-wide trend is towards gradual downsizing. In a recent IMF study of 37 countries, 90 per cent have slashed public-sector employment since 2009.
The public service will have to be rightsized to put the brakes on its expansion. It may require downsizing staff in policy-related departments — central agencies in particular — and beefing up the numbers in departments delivering public services direct to citizens.
Rightsizing should also involve eliminating duplication and redundancy of functions. Closing down or merging uneconomic services is another way. The Education Ministry is adept at it, merging schools with uneconomic enrolment.
Inter-agency collaboration and resource sharing is another way. The collaboration and sharing of resources by the police and armed forces in combatting crime is a case in point. The cluster concept of the Health Ministry, where nearby hospitals are grouped in a cluster, is another one. These hospitals share beds and health professionals, thereby optimising their use.
Barring critical services such as health and education, another means to rightsize is not to fill posts that are vacant. Posts that fall vacant on account of retirement can be left vacant. Overtime too could be restricted or denied. There should also be a fundamental shift in the employment paradigm.
Life-time employment may have to be replaced with renewable contracts. This will make it easier to jettison deadwood.
The current pension system is a drain on public coffers. Pension payments are expected to hit RM100 billion by 2030, which is equivalent to one-third of the current annual public expenditure. The system should be replaced by contributory pensions for new recruits. It will encourage new entrants to leave the service subsequently without losing their retirement benefits.
Digital-era governance and rightsizing should ensure a public service that works better and costs less.
The writer, a former public servant, is a principal fellow at the Graduate School of Business, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia