Public Sector Cuts
Nicola Willis sacrifices public servants to the budgetary process.
I walk around this town
As buildings close and windows are boarded
I think about you
When I hear a door slam in the wind
And the glass on the mat says welcome
I think about you
Songwriters: Paul Russell / Che Ness / Karl Steven / Timothy Stewart / Ian Jones / Benjamin Scia / Nicholas Atkinson / Joseph Lonie.
I felt a bit off yesterday, ill at ease at the thought of what was to come and wrote, thinking of public servants today as they wait to find out if their jobs and livelihoods will be ripped out from under them by a government that sees them as a nice-to-have, an optional extra.
Knowing what it would mean for those services, and, most importantly, what it would mean for those affected and their families. This was the pointy end of a conservative government. Move over, Ruth; zip it, Paula. It was time for Nicola Willis to join the pantheon of National Ministers who have seared hardship and austerity onto a generation.
Lena commented, “I worked for the government during the first round of cuts. It was mostly front-line (voluntary redundancy). I also know someone who got a massive payout after taking a redundancy. Only to be offered the same role several months later. Apparently, the organisation couldn't do without that role.”
Josephine said, “It's bloody heartbreaking knowing that thousands more people and whānau will be suffering yet again at the hands of our cruel Finance Minister.”
The news came through, and I posted:
A 14% cut and almost 9,000 Kiwi jobs lost. This is a very dark day for Aotearoa. 😢
Sarah wrote, “This will destroy Wellington, it's already bloody tough, and this is just absolutely mindblowing.”
Carol asked, “Is 9000 hard-working kiwis suddenly needing to claim unemployment benefits, kind, sensible progress!?!”
If Nicola’s first budget was supposedly a cull of the unnecessary ‘back office’, and her second was an attack on working women, this third budget will be remembered as the one in which she made arbitrary, additional cuts to the public service while pretending that the workload will be picked up by A.I., which the government knows little about.
There is no plan, no grand vision for the future of the public sector, not even a list of priorities; it’s just an arbitrary target to keep people like David Seymour and Jordan Williams from kicking up too much of a fuss. Speaking of whom, watching the news report on TVNZ, I posted:
With 9,000 families about to lose a breadwinner, it’s hard to say who looked more smug and punchable, Jordan Williams or David Seymour.
Unsurprisingly, most people chose c) both of them, even though it wasn't an option. Here is the 1 News clip if you want to see it:
Tory Relf from the Taxpayers’ Unions said, “Cutting the public service headcount is a big win for taxpayers. At long last, Minister Willis is putting some backbone into the books. But 55,000 must be the halfway mark, not the finish line. When National left office in 2017, the public service sat at around 47,000 FTEs - if that was enough then, it should be enough now.”
An organisation that was initially chaired by Chris Bishop’s father and is now chaired by Ruth Richardson, is celebrating and wants to see more cuts.
David Seymour said, “ACT would go further, but Budget 2026 is finally shrinking the Wellington bureaucracy so we can protect the front line.”
It must be bad enough facing the prospect of a job loss without listening to these people cheering it on and saying go further.
Public Service Association (PSA) national secretary Duane Leo said, “The Government claims savings of $2.4 billion - that’s money gone from services, simple as that. Less means less. Lower quality, slower and fewer services. These cuts will be cruel and deep and felt across the nation.”
Labour public service spokesperson, Camilla Belich, said, “At a time when families are already under pressure, Nicola Willis is choosing cuts that will make it harder for people to get help when they need it. This is a political choice. National is choosing austerity over strong public services and secure jobs.”
The Greens' public services spokesperson, Francisco Hernandez, said, “Nicola Willis is committing New Zealand to arbitrary headcounts which will eat into frontline services to balance her books, all because she lacks the courage to have an adult conversation about fixing our broken tax system.”
Nicola Willis’s action will see more Wellington businesses, some of which might have been just hanging on, close their doors for good. Inevitably, highly skilled people will leave for Australia, and they won’t be coming back. Rebuilding these services will cost more once it becomes clear that the cuts have degraded what CEO Man calls the “Customer Experience”.
This morning, Nicola Willis appeared on TVNZ’s Breakfast, where she was interviewed by Tova O’Brien, who asked her straight out, “How many jobs will go and where will they go from?” The $2.4b question.
Willis smiled as if she’d just cancelled Christmas, and explained that this was an opportunity for the public service to utilise digital tools to improve. She sounded as if she’d swallowed a TED talk but had no idea what it meant.
Tova mentioned speaking to Nicola a couple of years ago about another round of cuts and how the Minister had felt the impact on families. She asked how Willis was feeling about making another 8,700 people redundant, and the impact on them, particularly in the local area.
Nicola seemed to have gotten empathy lessons from Brooke van Velden and suggested that many of the cuts would be achieved through attrition rather than by telling someone not to come on Monday, while smiling broadly.
Then she said the economy was creating 150,000 new jobs every three months, her eyes nearly popping out of her head as she emphasised the word “new”. Cool story, Nicola, but people need more than your ghost jobs.
Tova wasn’t letting her off that easily and asked again how it felt to personally be responsible for thousands of people losing their jobs. That training from Brooke was working, as Willis made a concerned face, or perhaps she was constipated, and agreed that it was sad for those losing their jobs, before rapidly moving to point the finger at the various CEOs, who she said made the decisions.
“Change is hard,” offered Willis. I thought, try telling that to the 55-year-old long-term public servant who has given decades of loyal service and won’t find work again in this economy.
Willis even spoke glowingly of the importance of the work done by the Public Service, which really raised the question: why make sweeping job cuts with no plan for modernisation in place, beyond the assumption that it would be a good thing to do? By all means, introduce new tools to assist people in their work, but how about we wait until they bed in and there is evidence that fewer people are required before we jump straight to the job losses?
Then Nicola had the temerity to call back-office functions inefficient, two years after her budget targeted and removed many of those very workers.
Tova then asked another obvious question: what the modelling showed about these changes pushing people onto benefits. Unbelievably, there was no modelling, and Nicola seemed to be in a parallel universe where there were plenty of jobs, not in our reality of high unemployment and massive competition for the few roles available.
Nicola said she was confident there were jobs for people to go to, then made that awkward grin she adopts when she knows she's just told a massive porky, but she’s sticking to it despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Then she said that “Wellington continues to have lower unemployment than the country as a whole,” which is utter nonsense. Wellington actually has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, and it will only get worse soon.
We have a Finance Minister without a plan who denies that laying people off will necessarily increase unemployment, and who lacks an ounce of empathy for those facing the chop.
We can only hope this is Nicola’s last budget, as another three years of National and ACT in charge would decimate our Public Service. As a list-only MP, and with National likely to win many electorates but not to do so well in the Party Vote, based on current polling, Nicola may well find herself out of a job next term, even if the coalition wins.
But not to worry, Nicola, there are plenty of other jobs out there; think of it as an opportunity.
Have a good Wednesday, folks.
Ngā mihi,
Nick.
To end today, here’s Supergroove with Sitting Inside My Head:
As a frontline health professional clinician,
I clean , restock supplies, organise fricken menu ordering, answer a door atleast 50 times on a dayshift and the phone atleast 30 times in 8 hours all the while trying to provide focused and personalised healthcare
The ward is heaving all too often feels unsafe at times due to staffing fte or inadequate a lot more often to provide good care
They call it care rationing….and two of the IT systems that cost lots of money and are supposed to measure the acuity of each inpatient feels to my mind and others, to be great at gas lighting the staff into feeling the frustration of being told they have excess staff capacity hours on the shift while they yet again work through an unpaid meal break.
I have 6 IT systems that I have to use every day all take time to log into, we have new electronic inpatient white boards now that have constantly erred since their being brought in with as the stripped back IT service staff on the phone desk say, was mainly because it was just brought in without any period of IT testing
Apparently it’s supposed to work with the spine system but on the daily a white board that all multi disciplinary staff rely on, is not functioning or showing true or correct data at any time. Health and safety anyone ? Nah that’s an unnecessary back office or useless public service job who needs it ? Pardon my facetiousness but all the stress of it all honestly it makes me want to quit at times and I used to love my job.
I’m so angry at the way this government is decimating the public service and feel for all affected in these uncertain times - the timing no doubt of the first cull of this round will no doubt be just be just before Christmas or in Jan/ Feb when families face the massive costs of rates or rent hikes/ school fees and expenses etc… one term government - vote the bastards out !!!
Privatisation is the goal - already started with the very generous funding for charter schools, and the cheerful outsourcing of surgery public hospitals cannot manage to private hospitals, which are also very generously rewarded, costing taxpayers more.
That same money could go to support public hospitals instead of stretching them to the limits with understaffing. Burned out staff are then successfully transferred to private hospitals. That is how people at the bottom of the heap find themselves waiting for treatment they desperately need while money is channelled upwards. Only those who have it can afford the services once they’re private, putting an increasing number out in the cold. Why is this acceptable?
New Zealand was once a country that looked after all its people - poverty was rare and hunger unheard of. It is unconscionable that in a land of plenty like New Zealand children should be hungry and cold because of the utter selfishness of the smaller government brigade. The “back pockets” they talk about putting money into via tax cuts are their own!