Budapest, 18 July 2014
Good Afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen!
The genre of today’s gathering is unclear. We would like to achieve several things at once. It is not unusual for us to want to achieve several things at once in Hungarian public administration. These differing intents sometimes weaken each other, but with a little luck they reinforce each other. Today’s gathering is on the one hand a celebration, on the other an appointment ceremony, and thirdly a meeting to determine various tasks. I shall do my best to fulfil all three as much as possible. If you will allow me, I will close the celebratory part now by congratulating everyone. I think it is a great thing for someone to have the opportunity to head a county public administration authority. I think it a great thing for someone to personally be able to represent the state of Hungary, which wasn’t born yesterday, with only its Christian history spanning more than a thousand years. For someone to embody this tradition and continue it at his or her own county level is a great honour, I think. It is an opportunity that very few people receive. This is why we and you personally have reason to celebrate, because you have arrived at the gateway of such an opportunity.
In addition to celebrating, I would, however, also like to say a few things about the task and the work you will have to perform. About the fact that for many years there was no deliberate and well-founded public administration professional training in Hungary. If such courses did exist, they served the requirements of the Hungarian world that existed until 1990. And otherwise not too badly, to a fashion and at that level. Hungary had well-trained public administration professionals even in communist times. But since then, the vast majority of that knowledge – not all of it, but the vast majority – has become obsolete together with the world that it was designed to serve. The level of knowledge that was sufficient prior to 1990 was only in small part suitable to serve the requirements of Hungarian state life following 1990. However, after 1990 there followed a troubled period, a long and extended period of transition, as a result of which no public administration professional training evolved that was capable of automatically producing or turning out, to use the pre 1990 professional jargon, public administration managers who are capable of performing the tasks related to organising life in our counties, at mid-level public administration. This is why many of you have some kind of diploma in public administration, but this was not the main criteria when we decided to appoint you. It was not an unimportant criteria, but it was not decisive. We very much hope that with the help of Minister of State Zoltán Kovács the Prime Minister’s Office will succeed in establishing the systematic training of public administration professionals who understand the characteristics of the post 2010 world and who are capable of fulfilling its requirements, primarily through our new university and its Masters courses, to enable an automatic supply of public administration professionals to whom we can entrust management of state life over the next ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. This is where we stand today. This means that the significance of your persons and the weight and importance of your characters is much greater than that of mid-level public administration officials usually is in a state life that has a public administration training system that has been operating in a good, balanced way for many years.
Since no training of this kind existed, you have had to accumulate the knowledge required for the county-level management of public administration today from various sources. In your civil profession, some of you were lawyers, some were economists, some business experts, and there are some among you who were mayors of Members of Parliament. You have accumulated the knowledge, which it is our firm belief make all of you without exception well-suited to perform your new job. Despite the fact that you have not had the opportunity to take part in the previously mentioned automatic and reliable public administration training that provides career knowledge.
Despite this, we are positive that you are capable of performing this job and this task. Today, what guarantees this is not the well-established training system that you took part in, because no such system existed, but your character. This is why I ask that in this commission you also feel our personal recognition. You are not only receiving an opportunity to represent the Hungarian state, but you are also receiving recognition for what you have developed, accumulated and won for yourselves through your work in past years. We are proud of the fact that even without a well-constructed public administration training system Hungary is capable of finding leaders – because such people exist – who are qualified to direct county-level, mid-level public administration.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The work you will be performing is one of the world’s most complex tasks. Its level of complexity approaches the work of politicians. Public administration and politics are linked at many points. You are of course primarily state leaders and not politicians, but the two are akin and overlap. Your work is partly a mission, partly a profession and partly a task. And accordingly you must always be aware of the fact that not only will you need to perform your work, which will not take up a mere eight hours of your working day – I say for the sake of the newcomers – but, knowing the various ins and outs of the profession you must meanwhile provide high quality leadership while also always keeping in mind what is the point of the work you are performing.
This is mission or calling. As I have mentioned, your job will be to assure the continuity of the thousand-year-old Christian state of Hungary within your own counties. This is a great mission. I ask that you feel the responsibility that goes with it.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
One of the things that transpired between 2010 and 2014, when we began the restructuring of the Hungarian state, was that the state must be present at a district level. The state must be available to the country’s voters within a day’s walk, and this is why we reinstated the district system despite the fact that, since politically the district system was of course part of the repressive communist public administration machine, nobody sympathised with the districts in an ideological sense and this is why they ceased to exist after 1990, but 24 years was enough for us to recognise that it is impossible to efficiently organise the lives of our citizens without a district-level state presence; we cannot leave our citizens without help and support; in addition to the local government the central administration must also be present.
This is why we resuscitated the district system. But it was also apparent that the districts cannot link directly to the highest levels of public administration, meaning the ministerial systems, and so there is a definite need for mid-level public administration. This is what we thought in 21010 when we began the process of state reform with the supervision of Tibor Navracsics. Four years later, we can say for certain that what we assumed at the time was correct. And accordingly, today we can state the organisation of Hungarian state life begins at a county level. I believe that your office will remain a historically permanent part of Hungary’s state organisation and political life. The government will be organising the life of the country through government agencies and the directors of government agencies in the upcoming years.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
All I can promise you is yet more work and even higher expectations. More work, because if Minister of State Kovács succeeds in performing the tasks that he has been entrusted with, then public administration offices will receive new scopes of activity and new spheres of authority from 1 January 2015. This is a huge task, and although we have no doubt that the Minister of State would be capable of performing it on his own, we are also counting on your comments and recommendations. So what I expect from the Minister of State is that by January 2015 we rethink the spheres of authority of mid-level public administration and the order of supervision of the previously deconcentrated public authorities to include your experiences, and that means that you will have even more work to do following 1 January 2015.
With regard to the nature of your work, I would like to remind you that you are taking office during a period of people’s party government. The essence of people’s party government within the field of public administration is best explained by stating that the state’s job isn’t to make life more difficult for people, but to make it easier. And so what I would like to ask is that you of course always keep to the regulations, are always rigorous and your work should be performed according to the letter of the law, but that you never forget that lawfulness is not a value in itself, but one is rigorous and applies the regulations in order to make people’s lives easier. And if you see that certain regulations make people’s lives more difficult instead of making them easier, then do not hesitate to tell the central public administration authorities immediately or, if possible, if you have the required sphere of authority, immediately do away with those regulations to ensure that the state isn’t an obstacle that people must jump over, but instead provides assistance and is a place that they can turn to and make use of.
Another thing that I expect from you, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a significant improvement in the standard of state services, to which you usually say that if there was more money available then it would improve significantly, and to which I usually say that’s too easy, anyone could achieve it that way. There is no more money available, and yet the standard of services must nevertheless improve during the upcoming period. And accordingly I ask that despite the tight budget, in addition to maintaining the current level, you do not forget to do your utmost to ensure that the standard of the services you provide improved during the upcoming period. This is important to the people and it is also important to us, state leaders, because the country’s voters judge our performance to a significant extant based on your performance, and so we have an interest – in addition to national criteria – and personal interest in your personal success.
And finally, Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to say one other thing about the deeper meaning of your vocation, which I would like to link to what we call the renewal of the Hungarian state. One answer to the question of why we must reorganise the Hungarian state is to cite issues of efficiency. We say that it was wasteful, or it didn’t provide services of suitable quality, or it was not citizen-friendly, was certainly not of a people’s party nature, didn’t provide help to people and was instead designed to use its position of power to demonstrate its undoubted power and authority. I can list a host of reasons why we needed to reorganise the Hungarian state, but the true, deep essence of the work that we began in 2010 is that it is our belief that European social development – and I could perhaps say global social development – has arrived at a period in time in which the leaders of countries all over the world are facing the same challenge. The question today is no longer how to organise an economy well. Economies now also operate outside the nation state framework; they have well-known best practices, which are readily available, transposable and can be applied. And accordingly the key element in the race between national economies is no longer the economy itself, but much rather the mutual involvement and cooperation between the state and the economy. What decides who is competitive and who will be successful in future is who is capable of organising their state in such a way that it provides support and represents an economic competitive advantage to the country’s economic life. The countries that were capable of doing this are successful today. There is success in the East, in Singapore, for instance, and there is success in the West, as in Germany, let’s say. In countries that have been incapable of achieving this, the level of state services is low, the state’s ability to help the economy is weak and such countries have also found themselves at a disadvantage in the economic competition between national economies. And so it is the level of quality of state organisation, the level of the work performed there, the way in which it links to the economic system and the extent to which it helps people to turn the majority of their energy and attention to activities related to financial subsistence that determine the final result of the race between national economies, or at least these factors also determine the result. To a much greater extent than before. This is why we embarked on the reorganisation of the state in 2010. It is my firm belief that we were not wrong and that the determining factor in the race between national economies during the upcoming decade will be the level of quality of the state. A well-organised state means a competitive economy. A badly organised state equated to a national economy with no hope of success. This is the state of affairs in which we will live our lives.
I would like to dissipate the misconception that participating in integration, be it taking part in the system of global commerce or our participation in the European Union, somehow devalues or relegates to second place the significance of national public administration. The reality is precisely the opposite. The more we integrate into the global economy, the European Union and other units larger than ourselves, the greater the role of national public administration. I would like you to always keep this in mind. It is impossible to run the Hungarian state from Brussels, and it is even difficult to do so from Budapest; it is most easily done via county administrative centres. The greater the extent to which Hungary integrates into the EU and the modern global economy, the greater the need for a strong public administration, for a Hungarian public administration with our own, national perspective and based on our own, national culture, to protect our national values and the quality of Hungarian life. I present you with your letters of appointment in the hope that you understand this task, make it your own and will be capable of performing it.
I wish you much strength and good health for your work!