The Post: The question we should actually be debating about the public service

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Just as adults like to frighten children with tales of imps and monsters, so too do conservatives scare the public with large numbers out of context.

Last year we were told endlessly that Labour had increased public borrowing “to over $100 billion” – which sounded terrifying until one realised that state debt was still just 20% of GDP, around half the Australian figure, a fifth of the American one and one-tenth of the Japanese.

It’s the same story with the size of the state bureaucracy, one of the new Government’s great fixations. We’re told, ad nauseam, that between 2017 and 2023 Labour added 17,000 public servants. And that sounds like a lot.

But in the same time, the country’s workforce grew by over 300,000. Consequently, the core public service – the people who work in central government departments and agencies – have gone from 1.9% of the workforce in 2017 to 2.2% today. Hardly a drastic shift, considering that many public problems scale with time and population: every new technology that people invent, from drones to AI, poses new problems, which in turn requires new regulations enforced by more public servants. Hardly a drastic shift, either, considering how run-down parts of the state had become under National – a decay embodied in the raw sewage running down the walls of Middlemore Hospital – and the consequent need for rebuilding.

Put it a different way: each of the 65,699 public servants employed as of last December services around 80 New Zealanders. Again, in context, it doesn’t seem an extravagant number.

How, then, should we think about the Government’s public-sector cuts, which at last count will cost 3700 jobs (and rising)?

There is, arguably, some left-wing hyperbole about those numbers. Each potential job loss can be a source of great pain for those concerned, and for their families. (I should know: I have friends and relatives affected.) But in the last six months of 2023 alone, nearly 2600 extra public servants were employed, as agencies bulked up despite an impending change of government. The cuts currently proposed would only take us back to 2022 levels of employment.

If there is something catastrophic about a 3700-strong workforce reduction, presumably things were also in a catastrophic state in 2022. Yet no-one was saying that then.

The right-wing obsession with reducing state employment, though, is even more misguided.

First there is the manner in which the cuts are being made. Putting senior management in charge means that – surprise, surprise – not many senior managers are losing their jobs, despite the recent bloat in those areas.

And although some of the cuts are relatively surgical, as they relate to schemes National has scrapped, others are blunt. Some agencies’ policy teams are getting across-the-board cuts with little or no thought as to what capacity is needed or who should be retained.

I have been told of brilliant mid-ranking staff, people with private-sector experience and leadership potential, who are nonetheless being let go – and thus potentially lost forever to the public service – because of the unbelievably hasty and blunt manner in which the cuts are being made.

Those cuts are already affecting frontline services – foodbanks, wheelchairs, teams who help catch paedophiles – despite National’s promises to the contrary. The distinction between front and back office is, in any case, somewhat meaningless. If, for instance, back-office police staff are cut, officers may simply end up doing more paperwork.

The bigger point, really, is that the size of the state workforce is the wrong focus. What matters most is not how many public servants we have but what we need them to do. Which problems, in short, are they required to solve, and are they equipped to do so?

As I look ahead, I see an ever-growing pile of public challenges. We need to future-proof our infrastructure against climate change. We need to unravel the intertwined problems of poverty, mental health and educational failure that afflict so many young people. We need to build homes for the 25,000 families on the state-housing wait list, and work out how do so more efficiently – and beautifully – than before.

All these tasks will be solved, at least in part, by people working in the public service. Recall that government comes into existence, as the humanist John Dewey argued, when people cannot just live privately but find themselves bumping up against each other. It is a collective attempt to solve collective problems, to undertake tasks that people cannot do, or do so well, by themselves.

The scale of these tasks, the number of these problems, the extent to which we rub up against each other in our complex world: all this will only increase. Mass public-sector redundancies, then, make little sense. We should be redeploying our existing public servants to new goals, and ensuring they work more effectively, rather than letting them go en masse.