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Opinion: It’s late May, the week after this government’s first budget. More than 5000 public servants have learnt their jobs are to go in the past few months, and the bad news is coming daily. Most government agencies and departments are affected. Some 50 people here, another 90 there. There’s seemingly no end in sight.
People are being shown the door, morale is low and hundreds of vacant jobs will not be filled.
Sympathy from the government is non-existent, these cuts are their idea. It’s tough, says Prime Minister Christopher Luxon; he gets it. He goes on about balancing wasteful spending to protect frontline services; his government wants more “medical doctors, not more spin doctors”.
Of course this doesn’t apply to his social media team; there are now seven specialists working on pushing out content on his social media accounts. The perks of office, I guess: “Do as I say, not as I do”.
To say Wellington feels depressed doesn’t quite do the mood justice. It’s not just depressed but fearful about what and who is next. This government hasn’t finished yet, and it makes that clear.
Wellington is almost paralysed by this edict to cut costs across the public service by 6.5-7.5%. Programmes that are regarded as nice to have, or not doing anything much, are chopped. Travel budgets are slashed. If it’s deemed unnecessary, it goes.
The private sector is making cuts across the board, too. In Auckland, Wellington and the provinces, jobs are shed. The ridiculously high price of power sees central North Island pulp and saw mills close and 230 more workers are laid off.
High inflation and high interest are ripping through the economy like the grim reaper. As a result, retail outlets struggle to keep their heads above water. By July, Retail NZ’s quarterly survey finds 43% of retailers are unsure if they will survive the next 12 months.
Despite it all, the government holds the line.
Fast-forward and we arrive at the here and now. Act leader David Seymour tells me that another $4 or $5 billion will need to be saved in the lead-up to next year’s Budget. That means more jobs will go.
But here’s the thing. Some do appear to be immune from the overall cost-cutting target. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example, cut only 1% from its 2024/25 budget with its minister, Winston Peters, the current deputy PM, bypassing Finance Minister Nicola Willis and writing directly to the Prime Minister. Seymour, too, is given his bauble of office - the Ministry of Regulation – an entirely new agency tasked with, well, cutting regulation and making other agencies smaller.
In June, 10 public servants from the Foreign Affairs, Primary Industries and Environment ministries get approval to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a trip to Europe to spend 10 days in Bonn, Germany, for a United Nations climate change conference. Some flew business class. In response to a Taxpayers Union Official Information Act request, ministries confirmed the trip cost more than $150,000 (and counting, given MFAT is yet to reveal some of the costs, saying it is too busy).
I get that climate change is important, and we have to be at these meetings but seriously, when thousands of people are losing jobs, I believe this was the wrong call to make. There’s also the irony of the combined air-mile emissions. It continues to baffle me that the UN and all the countries that send representatives to these conferences have yet to find Zoom, Google Meet, or any of the other apps that allow people to convene via the internet.
The optics are not great. After all, this is a bunch of people who are telling the world about the necessity of cutting carbon emissions, but they jump on planes, hop into cars and stay in hotels and generally leave an almighty carbon footprint by doing so. Did they plant trees to offset their emissions? Their answer to the Taxpayers Union’s OIA does not say.
Do they know what this looks like to people who have just lost their jobs and been told there is no money to keep them on? What would the mill workers who’ve been let go think of this?
But here’s the kicker. Kay Harrison, NZ’s Climate Change Ambassador who represents the country at climate negotiations, resigned after returning from Bonn. Now she’s a climate consultant in the private sector and all that knowledge she gained in her long career at the Environment Ministry and MFAT has gone with her.
On her LinkedIn page, she makes it clear it was time she had her own voice. But to me, it feels as if one final shindig was on us, the taxpayers.
It’s all very well continuing to lecture us about what is good and what behaviours we must adopt. Harrison says we need to be more ambitious and continues to demand more action from us.
Presumably that involves flying less, but is that only us?
