Where have public service cuts left NZ and how did the Government do?

Saturday, 23 November 2024

The Post series ‘Inside the cuts’, documents aspects of what it was like inside the public service when job cuts began occurring.

While public service restructures have become the norm, the recent cuts to staff and programmes have left the country with a fundamentally different public service. So how did the Government do, and what should public servants expect for the future?

Signals were clear before the election that National and ACT would make cuts to the public service ‒ the only question left was, to what extent?

Former United Future leader Peter Dunne said the Government oversold its rhetoric at the beginning ‒ “it made the cut process much more harsh”.

“And certainly, if you look at a city like Wellington, the consequences of that for the local economy, local morale, it's been quite serious.

He said the Government may have been trying to establish credibility, but “really what it did was probably alienate a lot of people … that this was a bit heartless and a bit lacking in focus”.

Asked if the overall strategy had been successful, Dunne said: “They've probably broken the back of what they were going to do, which may have have been a deliberate strategy to get out there hard and nasty early ‒ and then start to pull back.

“It just looked a bit like a blunderbuss at the beginning. Having said that, I think that they do get some credit, in a way, for not backing down, for sticking with the programme, but now they've probably done enough to give them a little bit of leeway to be more flexible in the future.”

Dunne said the Government may not have expected the reaction outside Wellington they had received. “I think that might have just jolted them a little bit.”

“The question then is, did they go too hard and too nasty early on? They've made it clear in much more quiet ways that this isn't the end, there will be an ongoing programme, but I think it's going to be a little bit more balanced and nuanced in the future than it's been to date.”

Massey University politics professor Richard Shaw said the term ‘back office staff’, for the main target of the cuts, was problematic.

“It's a code that's supposed to send a signal that people who are not involved in face to face … relationships with members of the public are somehow less significant to the design and the delivery of public services.

“It's increasingly less the case given the extent to which public services rely on IT infrastructure and good quality data and co-ordination across departments and agencies and so on.

“The quality of the thing that is delivered on the ground is fundamentally shaped by what happens in what we somewhat glibly call the back office.”

Shaw said there was a legitimate question to be asked ”about the medium to long run consequences of reducing your public service capacity”.

“I don't imagine that this process has finished. This will be a defining feature of this government.

“There will continue to be downward pressure on agencies’ and departments’ budgets, and I think that that's what has created a number of challenges and a number of issues, which we would do well to reflect on.”

Asked if the pace at which the Government entered into cuts and changeovers in public service bosses helped to speed up change in the public service to better reflect itself, Shaw said, “absolutely”.

“They just turned the funding tap off. That is a much quicker way of having an impact upon the capacity of the public service, the central government departments, than reshaping the sector.”

Green Party public service spokesperson Francisco Hernandez said the impact of the public service cuts were affecting “the lives of real people”.

“If the conversation is about prioritising the public, we're absolutely ready to have that conversation. If the conversation is about, what the right size is and what the proper role is for the public service, we're always ready to have that conversation.

“But the problem is that it hasn't been a conversation. It's been a kind of one-sided programme of cuts that have kind of degraded New Zealand’s ability to respond to situations and they've been ideologically driven.”

Public Service Minister Nicola Willis on the other hand, saw the outcome as a success.

“We have made progress in focusing the public services efforts and resource on the priorities of the Government. I've also seen the Public Service quite properly, maintain its integrity, its neutrality, and have that consistency of approach, which is really positive to see.

“What I've seen from public servants is a real willingness to get on and deliver, and often an appreciation that having more focus and clarity about what the actual priorities are and where resources should be, has been welcomed.”

Asked what public servants should expect next, if there will be rolling cuts, or base level cost saving exercises for the rest of the financial years, Willis replied: “One thing that I think is really important to point out, that is consistently missing from reporting, is that a large number of the roles that were reduced were not roles that actually had people in them, they were vacancies”.

“What became clear to us during our value for money exercise was that many agencies were holding open large numbers of vacancies and using the funding that would have been available for those roles for other purposes, to give themselves their own flexibility.

“It's good to have a more transparent, honest view of what the roles are in an organisation and who is filling them …

“Some of the reductions in spending that have occurred were stopping programmes that were going nowhere and that had become very expensive, such as the Three Waters reforms, such as the failed RMA reforms of the previous government. That, in itself, has freed up a lot of resource.”

Asked what she would have done differently, Willis said: “I think it was irresponsible for the last government to let numbers in the public service build up so high in back office roles when that was clearly not going to be sustainable.

“The challenge we've had is having to make those changes so that we can right-size it and get things in a way that can be afforded by New Zealand taxpayers into the future.”

A handful of workers The Post spoke to actually welcomed the cuts, but some felt it left no place to professionally progress. Most have been left worn out and disillusioned over the uncertainty and upheaval ‒ with the prospect of continual restructures leading some to look for work elsewhere, many outside of New Zealand.