Letters: Nicola Willis adds insult to injury by ordering public sector workers back to the office

Public Service Minister Nicola Willis has asked government departments to call their staff back to the office and to enforce stricter rules around working from home. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Govt punishes workers again

Public Service Minister Nicola Willis appears to regard workers not as humans with needs and preferences, but simply as cogs in an economic machine designed to reap profits for business.

Having slashed thousands of Wellington public service jobs, she now berates those who remain for not spending money in the central city and believes the solution is to force more of them to come into the city (NZ Herald, September 24). This conjures up an image of robots who will automatically spend when the opportunity is in front of them.

Both Willis and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon admit they do not know how many public servants work from home, but have decided this is a problem for “productivity” without a shred of evidence. But of course it’s easier to fix a problem that does not exist than to address the challenging ones that do.

If she is worried about the survival of businesses, rather than waving a big stick at office workers, Willis might consider how to make the CBD more attractive.

Andrea Dawe, Sandringham.

Public sector test

Nicola Willis appears to have embarked on her own social engineering crusade regarding public service work arrangements, admittedly without supporting data and in the face of workplace legislation.

Will the same public service leaders who fell over without a whimper when the Government ordered their peevish demotion of te reo Māori from department titles once again cave in to being told how to manage their staff?

Peter Beyer, Sandringham.

WFH a waste of time

Working from home is never as productive as the office. The Covid era forced it upon some, but now the perk of working unsupervised has been called out. Aside from human interaction and the cafe spend across all locations, WFH lacks accountability. Unless your job can be measured with firm statistics proving being at home brought tangible results, all that WFH stands for is a long weekend, a good sleep in and being able to head away for a three-day weekend while still being on the payroll.

John Ford, Napier.

How to lose the room

If you employ staff, their morale plays a huge part in their ability and willingness to be productive. Two of the worst things you can do as a manager is tell them they have no job security and then say you do not trust them to do their job. These two actions by the Government should guarantee a drop in productivity by the public service.

Gil Laurenson, Eastern Beach.

Poverty isn’t political

I’m sure the children who go to bed hungry and cold every night and wake up the next day in despair could give a toss which government is responsible for the slow progress in reducing child poverty numbers (NZ Herald, September 23). I am so thoroughly fed up with successive political parties playing pass the parcel when new data reveals a failure of policy delivery, particularly in such a crucial area as child poverty.

Was Labour’s material hardship target overly ambitious, and National’s not ambitious enough? Most likely a bit of both, but percentages and numbers can’t adequately reflect the suffering these 143,700 children are experiencing.

Because of inaction on both governments’ parts, a vacuum has been created, and out of necessity many community charities have worked tirelessly to fill the gap. The coalition should utilise the expertise of these groups, cease the bickering and cough up the funding.

Mary Hearn, Glendowie.

Local contribution

Marie Guerreiro (NZ Herald, September 24) elaborates on plans to decarbonise Auckland’s transport system: “The Terp pathways use the experience of cities such as Paris, London, Sydney, Barcelona, Singapore … to show this transformation is possible”.

It is notable that all these quoted cities were built on flat land and with more intensive housing. How plausible is it to use them as templates for Auckland’s transformation?

The article also talks about low-traffic neighbourhoods. These flourish where town centres are preserved and local shops can flourish. In the enthusiasm to decarbonise, there has been a disregard for the local shopkeeper by the likes of AT seeking to remove daytime parking and shorten parking periods. Local businesses and villages need to be factored in for the contribution they make to less journeying.

Chris Chrystall, Epsom.

Bridge obstacles

Correspondent Ted Phythian (NZ Herald, September 23) recommends Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown’s plan for a bridge from Meola Reef to Verrans Corner. I can’t speak for the southern end, but at the north this plan would dump motorway traffic into a residential area where the roads are already saturated at rush hour.

He suggests widening those roads, which would be at the expense of demolishing hundreds of houses. He also ignores that the new road would cut right through the Kauri Point bush reserve, in terrain that the 2023 floods showed to be very liable to slips.

Brian Carpenter, Auckland Central.