Larry Williams Drive

On principle, I like Nicola Willis' idea of performance pay for the chief executives in the public sector. It's actually not a new idea, we were doing it until Jacinda's lot got in and Chris Hipkins, the then-relevant minister, cancelled it. And it was pretty generous, up 15 percent on top of base pay. Since some of those guys in the public sector get paid close to $700,00 a year, that's another $100,000 if they strike their targets.We'll just have to see if it works or not, but a cursory look at performance would say it might have an impact. Because the public sector was running a lot better before Jacinda when they had performance pay, than it was under Jacinda without it.But generally, it’s a smart idea to try to get the public sector to run a bit more like the private sector. And this is pretty standard for a private sector CEO. The reason I say that is because the private sector is simply better at what it does than the public sector. Take a business that makes widgets, for example - its job is to make t