The Government has set ambitious targets across 10 results areas, for the public service to achieve over the next five years.

The targets focus on difficult issues like reducing crime, reducing long-term welfare dependency and reducing educational underachievement.

Over most of the 2000s, the public service was too narrowly focused on departmental outputs and spending more taxpayers’ money. These new targets are part of a culture change aimed at getting the public service organised around delivering actual results.

The graph above shows one of our education targets, which is to increase the percentage of 18-year-olds with NCEA Level 2, or an equivalent qualification, to 85 per cent in 2017, from about 68 per cent now.

Lifting educational achievement gives individuals the opportunity to succeed.

Reaching this target won’t be easy and will require some real change. It will mean doing some things differently and we expect that if something isn’t working the public service will stop it and try something else.

Public service agencies will need to work more closely together and they will need to organise themselves around delivering results, not just outputs.

We’ve already seen good progress in the justice sector where collaboration between the Ministry of Justice, Police and Corrections is leading to lower crime rates and lower costs.

We want to extend that approach across other sectors and we’re giving agencies more tools to achieve this through changes to the State Sector Act, Public Finance Act and Crown Entities Act.

We’re also making public sector chief executives accountable for achieving results, not just managing a department or agency.

We expect innovation. Achieving these results will require the public service to learn fast and adapt quickly.

24 May. The full PowerPoint presentation by the Finance Minister at the Budget 2012 presentation. 24 charts.