Newstalk ZB
Finance Minister Nicola Willis is set to unveil public service cuts she will make as part of Budget 26, as the Prime Minister declares jobs will be lost so public services can be improved. Willis is set to outline her plan in a speech to business representatives in Auckland, where she will expand on her comments pointing to reducing the public service headcount, adopting more technology and shrinking the number of public departments. Willis is expected to speak from 12.50pm. A livestream will be played at the top of this article. Speaking to Newstalk ZB yesterday, Willis indicated she disapproved of the number of public departments New Zealand had compared to other nations. She also expressed a willingness to embrace “the AI revolution” and pointed to how the public service headcount had grown from 1% of the country’s population to 1.2% in 2017. Willis said she would set a 2029 workforce reduction target. Using current population projections, a return to 1% could lead to a reduction of 8000 net roles. Speaking to reporters this morning at Parliament, Luxon acknowledged people would lose their jobs as a result of his Government’s public service cuts, which he was quick to defend. “Yes, there will be job losses over time. “The public service is not a make-work function, it’s not here just to maintain jobs and maintain a position of how it was always run since 1995, in the same way. “We have to constantly evolve the public service to make sure it’s on point and it’s delivering for New Zealanders.” The Government is currently creating a new Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport (MCERT), which merges the Ministry for the Environment with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, the Ministry of Transport, and parts of the Department of Internal Affairs. Luxon pointed to the new ministry as a recognition central Government had failed in some of its collaboration with local government, and it made sense to join ministries together. “There’ll be cases where it doesn’t make sense for it to come together, but there are also lots of cases where we have endlessly duplicated IT services, accounts payable services, lots of back-office functions.” Luxon didn’t rule out reforming the number of ministers in his Government, given one of the many gripes he had was ministries reporting to several ministers at a time. Labour leader Chris Hipkins said the proposed public service job cuts weren’t “good news for New Zealanders”, noting that a large portion were based outside of Wellington. He suggested that frontline workers could be caught up in the losses. “They’re social workers working with vulnerable kids and families, people working in our prisons, people working at our border, people working in the conservation estate, they are frontline jobs.” Hipkins said he had “no problem” with a “more integrated public service” and using technology, but he wasn’t keen on “setting arbitrary targets”. “There is no way you could reduce that many people working for our public service without reducing frontline services.” Asked if he would like a “more integrated service” that had the same headcount of workers, Hipkins acknowledged that may lead to job losses. He said a particular headcount shouldn’t be a measure of success. “We should be focused on having the right number of people to do the jobs that we need.”
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