Editorial: Job losses courting disaster

The likely loss of jobs in the courts and tribunals sector of the Ministry of Justice is nearing the pits when it comes to the way some of our public services are being depleted of numbers and, in some cases, experience.

Our courts are in many ways the final receptacle for grievance and regular cohort frustration: If the court can't sort it out, then who can?

Thus, there is a need, some might say increase in need, for staff levels in our court precincts to be maintained at all cost, but the evidence is there to see right at the front counters of the 19 courthouses throughout the country.

These are places where the service to the public has to be spot on, and it is no fault whatsoever of the staff that there can be queues, and delays, which have the potential to have catastrophic effects.

Those on the deck are award-meriting people who face other people's crisis situations every day, often in some considerable number.

They certainly don't need more, and the Public Service Association (PSA) concern that roles are being dis-established without clear rationale has an extra edge in a structure where people are by far the most necessary component. For each one taken away, someone else's job will get harder.

Similarly, the notion that everyone should just put up with it because it's happening everywhere holds little water, for those who once leapt out of bed every morning to race off to a job they loved and now find it to be some sort of daily ordeal needing to be endured to keep the mortgage ticking over and the pantry filled.

"There will be knock-on effects and the thing is very disruptive for everyone," a PSA spokesman said after the Ministry confirmed 51 more jobs could go and that the staff count of 2500 in the courts and tribunals could drop further.