According to Finance Minister Nicola Willis, trashing the public service (“an old clunky system” says Willis, a “make work scheme” says Christopher Luxon, “a job creation scheme” says Chris Bishop) is all about finding a way to put the $2.4 billion saved into paying for more hip operations, and putting more nurses on wards. Yeah right.
If Willis really is at her wit’s end trying to find a way to fund more hip operations, why doesn’t she save those 8,700 public sector jobs and cancel the $3 billion tax break the government gave to landlords – because hey, that would give Willis even more money to spend on hip operations and pay for even more nurses on wards.
It’s a fools game though trying to find a rational reason for cutting the jobs and income security of so many public servants, thereby sending Wellington’s retail economy into a death spiral. In part, these job cuts are revenge on Wellington for voting centre-left. It is also driven by a religiously held belief by the likes of David Seymour that government is bad, and needs to be made as small as possible.
This close to an election, the job cuts are also a useful way of distracting the public from the sickly state of the economy, and/or from brooding about the cost of living crisis that the Luxon government has failed so miserably to ease, let alone resolve.
We don’t yet have chapter and verse about which agencies and jobs will get the axe. That’s not how this works. Willis and Co simply pluck a figure out of the air and then tell the departmental and agency heads to come back with a plan to make this work somehow, as best they can. In similar “reforms” of the public service, the people fired could often be quickly re-hired (at great expense) as consultants. That won’t happen this time, because these particular job cuts are occurring hand in hand with deep cuts to operational funding. No-one will be doing the work, this time.
Meaning: the public services that we pay taxes to receive are being starved to death. There are some interesting exceptions, though. The jobs bloodbath will be among people employed in policy areas that the government doesn’t like, while it carefully exempts those working on its own pet policies. That explains why Defence – where magically, there is an extra $12 billion to spend, despite the absence of any credible imminent threat – will be exempted from the job cuts/operational funding cuts. Corrections will also be exempt. Because hey, if you plan on throwing more people in jail, chances are you will be building more prisons to house them, and need more warders to guard them.
Corrections is also a significant area of policy failure and socio-economic waste. Bill English said as much a decade ago. Yet lavishly funding Corrections and Defence is – apparently – a higher priority for this government than those mythical hip operations and nurses on wards. Essentially, the government isn’t short of money. It simply doesn’t want to spend the tax take in the areas preferred by most of the public.
Number magic
Yesterday’s speech by Finance Minister Nicola Willis had three main themes: the scrapping/amalgamating of state entities (still to be specified) more use of AI, and by 2029, an arbitrary cap on core public service numbers of 1% of the entire population. It is this arbitrary cap that will cause the loss of nearly 8,700 public sector jobs over the next three years.
In a more rational political environment, we would be looking after the people working in the public service trenches, and thanking them for soldiering on amidst funding cuts and hiring freezes. Lest we forget…we also happen to be in the midst of a chronic cost of living crisis, and a burgeoning fuel crisis. We have a significantly high unemployment rate that’s heading higher, record numbers of youth unemployed, food kitchens facing unprecedented demand, and ….a government response that doesn’t seem to go much beyond pulling scapegoats out of a hat. Last week: immigrants. This week: public servants.
BTW, the fact that the public service grew under the last government is not evidence of waste. It could just as credibly be taken as a sign of long neglected needs finally being met with boots on the ground.
In reality, the size of the public sector largely depends on what the public sector is being asked to do, and whose needs it is being expected to meet.
Moreover, as RNZ pointed out yesterday, 57% of the people employed in the core public service are located around the country in places other than Wellington, including the 21% of public servants based in Auckland. When these people lose their jobs (and the income on which their families depend) the effects will be felt all around the country. The capital however will bear the brunt, with an estimated loss of another 3,500 jobs coming on top of earlier rounds of ideologically driven job losses. Retail spending is likely to dry up immediately, given the anxious belt tightening that yesterday’s announcements will already be generating right across the city.
Not that the government cares much about such impacts. Both Willis and Chris Bishop have been burbling on about the capital’s film and tech sectors. (So, to ensure the film sector remains competitive in future, does Willis intend to raise the rebate level available on what major international film productions spend here? Unlikely.)
No surprise that the 1% hiring cap mooted by Willis has not been based on empirical evidence or consideration of the public’s unmet needs. No one in government has identified the objectives that a 21st century public service should be tasked with meeting, and/or the funds and staffing it would need to succeed. Willis is merely demanding that more be done, with less. Its so much easier to cut than to build.
Governing by numerology
You have to wonder: what is it about right wing New Zealand politicians and their numbers fetish? During their formative years, maybe they spent too much time saying their times tables. Whatever the reason, they seem to have an almost kabbalistic faith in the power of numbers. As in: the size of government has to be no more than 30% of GDP. Crown debt should be no more than 30% of GDP. Inflation should be no less than 1% ,and no more than 3% barring exceptions made for the current government. All of these figures are totally arbitrary, but all of them have been given religious significance.
Will the 1% ratio of public servants to population be enough to deliver the range of services that we pay taxes to receive – and will it deliver the policies likely to increase the nation’s health, wealth and wellbeing? Willis hasn’t got a clue, and has no interest in finding out. Plainly, no-one in this government subscribes to the hard-earned 21st century wisdom that a nation’s wealth generation requires an active partnership between the state, the corporate sector, and the unionised workforce, with the state often taking a leading role. [See: Germany, South Korea, Singapore etc.]
In these public sector purges, a lot of vital institutional knowledge will be lost entirely, or taken overseas. As a result, fewer overworked people will be left to deliver a lower quality, less diverse range of public services. As Christopher Luxon says, the public service isn’t a make-work scheme. Evidently, he aims to turn it into a sweat shop.
Footnote One: Like the rest of the political/corporate sector, Willis has a credulous faith in AI, despite the mounting evidence that the net productivity gains from AI have been wildly over-stated. In part, this is due to the tendency of AI to “hallucinate” at a regular and significant rate. This means AI cannot safely reduce the size of the human work force, and nor can it free humans up to do other things. If anything, it means the workload of human workers increases, since they now have to manage, correct and generally baby sit the AI contributions to workplace outputs.
In sectors where accuracy is crucial – like public health, legal work, journalism etc – the need for constant checking erodes the productivity outputs and increases the rate of burnout among the humans ultimately responsible. AI can do some things well, but it can’t be entrusted to do many other things at all. Nicola Willis seems oblivious to that reality.
Footnote Two: In the last 24 hours there has a lot of talk of “stream-lining” the public service, and making gains in efficiency. That’s unlikely, given that the workforce targets have been set without a skerrick of consultation or cost/benefit rationales or supportive data of any kind. Any efficiency gains are likely to be accidental.
Besides, the public service was already on funding/staffing diets that had stream-lined it to the point of anorexia. Hmm. Before it got seduced and started hanging out with the wrong crowd, “efficiency” used to be an innocent little word. At its best, it conjured up images of health and economy, of things whirring happily in place as men and women in suits strode confidently towards their destiny. Efficiency, seen in that light, is the enemy of waste, and the friend of purpose.
At its worst, though, efficiency also has a ruthless quality, and is easily irritated by human frailty. These days, when people use the word “efficient” it can be taken as a reliable sign that means have become ends, and that what started out as a quest for the wiser use of resources has now totally jumped the shark.
Regardless, right wing politicians can’t get enough of it. In their hands, ‘efficiency’ has a usefully breathless ‘no time to lose’ aspect to it – as if only inefficient quibblers with too much time on their hands would dare to question the policies being fast tracked in efficiency’s good name.
It really is a scam. The word ‘efficiency’ is merely the sauna to which the crusty old policies of slashing wages, degrading public services and reducing the size of government are being sent, to provide them with an illusion of health.
Footnote Three: Here are some numbers the government doesn’t seem to be losing any sleep over : the 163,000 people unemployed. The 406,000 people who are either unemployed, underemployed, or have given up searching for jobs. The one in six children living in poverty. Cutting the workforce will inhibit the ability of the state to fix those harms.