Source: Radio New Zealand
The Prime Minister says the public service isn’t a “make-work” scheme as he signals there will be job losses as a result of proposed government changes.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis will set out three proposals in her Auckland pre-Budget speech on Tuesday afternoon in an effort to create efficiencies in the public service.
These are centred on cutting and amalgamating government agencies, more work on digitisation and using AI, and setting a target to reduce the public service head-count to 1 percent of the total population by 2029.
Speaking to reporters at Parliament on Tuesday morning, Christopher Luxon, said there was a “real opportunity to leverage technology” to be more efficient with taxpayer dollars.
Luxon said it would be case-by-case when it comes to what and how agencies could be amalgamated.
“There will 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 … and what I’ve observed coming from outside of politics is that you know the system has just been the system for 30 to 40 years, and no one ever asked the fundamental question of, right, well, why do we have 16 ministers interfacing with an organisation like MBIE.”
There will be job cuts, but Luxon wouldn’t put a number on how many.
“There will be job losses over time. Some of that will happen through attrition, some of that will happen over a period of time.
Christopher Luxon said it will be case-by-case when it comes to what and how agencies could be amalgamated. RNZ / Kim Baker Wilson
“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. It’s pretty exciting, sort of proposition,” he said.
Having just recently visited Singapore, the prime minister said it was a good example of a country better applying AI and technology in the public service.
“Even look at the work that’s been happening in Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia as well.
“You’ve got people who need to purchase a house, they go around a very convoluted process, trying to prove their identity, trying to prove their income, that can be automated. You think about a Mum with an 11 and a nine-year-old, and one needs eye glasses, and she’s trying to work out her working for families tax credits. There’s a whole bunch of better ways in which we can deliver those results,” he said.
Infrastructure Minister and Hutt South MP Chris Bishop is overseeing the amalgamation of the ministries for the environment, housing and urban development, transport, and the local government functions of internal affairs.
The stand-up date for the new ministry – MCERT – is 1 July but Bishop says it will be years before the savings are seen.
“This is about setting the public service up for the future. It’s not about immediate savings in the next six months or even the next year, it’s about setting the public service up to be firstly a better partner for local government.
“One of the points I make to local government is that central government has been a useless partner with them in terms of grappling with the great challenges facing us, from housing through to climate adaptation, through to infrastructure funding and financing, we’ve been hopeless at it, and part of the reason we haven’t been very good at it is that we haven’t organised ourselves properly.
“So that is the big driver for the creation of MCERT,” he said on his way to caucus.
Bishop also pushed back on the idea that Wellington and the Hutt Valley are public service cities and would be deeply impacted by the proposed cuts.
“This idea that the Hutt Valley is just made up of public servants who get on the train in their walk shorts and go to Wellington every day for work is offensive and wrong about the Hutt Valley.
“It is an amazing place, in the same way that every suburb of Wellington is, with incredible businesses, and we’ve got to stop stereotyping Wellington as just this boring public service town. It is so much more than that, and we need to stop thinking about it like that,” Bishop said.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins said the changes on the table were “not good news for New Zealanders”.
Speaking ahead of his party’s caucus meeting on Tuesday, Hipkins said “more than half of the jobs in question are outside the Wellington region”.
“So, these are frontline people working all over the country, 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 isn’t against a more integrated and technology driven public service, but said there were limitations to that.
“All of those could potentially be good things, but setting arbitrary targets to potentially reduce the public service by 10,000 people. There is no way you could reduce that many people working for our public service without reducing frontline services.”
Labour proposed its own cuts to the public service in late 2023, when in government, to the tune of 2 percent.
Asked about how many jobs would have been lost then, Hipkins said the advice he had was “there were a lot of vacancies that would be unfilled, and that they would just disestablish those jobs, so they wouldn’t have resulted in people losing their jobs”.
“There would have ultimately been a disestablishment of a number of jobs,” he said.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand