Our Outcome Contribution

The Treasury’s outcomes

The Treasury has three outcomes. Each of these outcomes reflects, and gives effect to, the Treasury’s three roles. These outcomes are equally important and are interrelated. A stable and sustainable macroeconomic environment is a key foundation for a growing economy. And while improved State sector performance is important in its own right for ensuring the delivery of quality services to New Zealanders, ensuring efficiency in the provision of those services also contributes to improved economic performance.

While the work of individual staff may contribute to more than one outcome, the Treasury is structured into policy groups based on the three outcomes. This helps to create shared purpose and gives a concerted focus to our work.

As part of Stepping Up, we are aiming to concentrate more energy, and have more impact, on a smaller number of strategic issues within each of these outcomes. By doing so, we are also better placed to work with other agencies on those issues to offer the Government more solutions and new ideas. We are also seeking to be more flexible to respond to changes in our operating environment. Some of the changes we are making to achieve this are:

• focusing on the most significant and pervasive economic issues. As part of this we will identify the results that matter most for the economy and monitor actual performance against these
• undertaking in-depth, and more uniform, performance analysis on those parts of the State sector that are most fiscally significant and most important for achieving the Government’s economic objectives
• introducing more performance information into the Government Budget process
• seeking more strategic engagement with departments on the overall fiscal position and how they can support Government fiscal objectives
• reducing our involvement in other areas, particularly in non-essential Budget work, in order to focus resources and be more effective.

The Treasury’s outcomes also reflect the Government’s broad objectives. And in deciding where we will focus our efforts in achieving each outcome, we consider how best we can contribute to achieving those Government objectives.

Supporting the Government’s objectives

The Prime Minister’s Statement to Parliament for 2007 urged New Zealand to develop strategies to build and maintain a sustainable society along three fronts:

• To build a sustainable economy based on innovation and quality (the Government’s economic transformation budget theme).
• To sustain family and community living standards in an open and competitive economy (the Government’s families – young and old budget theme).
• To sustain our unique culture, values and national identity in a world of globalised media and culture (the Government’s national identity budget theme).

The challenge for the Treasury is to identify, given our specific skills and role in the public service, how we can best help the Government to develop these strategies.

As the Government’s key economic and fiscal advisor, we contribute most directly to the goal of building a sustainable economy, through our improved economic performance and stable and sustainable macroeconomic environment outcomes. Our improved State sector performance outcome contributes to ensuring that government services to families and communities are effective, while supporting the economic objectives.

Under our central agency role, the Treasury has a responsibility to take the lead in promoting sustainable practices within the public service. The Treasury is one of six public service agencies committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2012. In 2007/08, the Treasury will work with other agencies to develop and begin implementing plans to measure, reduce and offset our carbon emissions. The Treasury’s efforts will build on our existing programme of recycling and waste minimisation, put in place as part of the Govt³ initiative to encourage sustainable practices in the public sector.

Measuring our performance – what we mean by taking a results focus

In Strengthening our Capability we outlined that as part of Stepping Up we are seeking to apply a results focus to our work.

The Treasury’s three outcomes are broad, and for each there are many factors that will affect whether the outcome is achieved. In practice, the Treasury has always looked to identify those factors that matter most for achieving our outcomes and has undertaken work on those factors where we believe we can make an impact. Through the results focus, we are attempting to be more explicit about undertaking this prioritisation process and about identifying what we think is a good result for helping to achieve the overall outcome.

The high-level approach we have taken to define our strategic priorities and the results we are seeking is set out in the following diagram:

Results framework

By breaking down the outcomes into sub-outcomes, and then further to “results areas”, we can be clearer about the results we are working towards, the contribution the Treasury can make, how we will work with other agencies to achieve these results and how we will assess our success. This is an important internal management tool both in setting our strategy and work programme and also in assessing our contribution to achieving our outcomes.

Through introducing results specification to all areas of our work, we are introducing better measures of performance.

Introducing a results focus is an evolving process. The material in the following pages will illustrate that we are at different points in that evolution for each outcome. As an example of the type of specification we are working towards in each of the results, the results specification for one of the Treasury’s key products, the Government Budget, is included below.

For the main result and intermediate results, measures of success are then specified. Measures may differ over the three-to-five year horizon as we track progress towards the intermediate and the main result.

On the following pages, we explain each of the Treasury’s three outcomes and why each matters, and describe recent performance towards each outcome. We then break the overall outcome down into our sub-outcomes and results areas and outline the Treasury contributions we are seeking to make in the results areas.

Results specification for the Government Budget