-
The Beehive and Parliament - Source: ONE News -
Watch Video
-
Related
The scalpel is carving into the flesh of public sector with
figures on Wednesday showing 1,500 jobs have been chopped.
The government says it is about shifting resources from the back
office to the front line and on Wednesday the axe came to the
Ministry of Health.
It was announced on Wednesday that 130 jobs would be going from the Health Ministry, as the government released updated figures showing nearly 1,500 jobs had gone across the core state sector.
The health ministry is looking to reduce full-time positions to 1,390 by the end of this financial year and to 1,290 by July next year.
The economy may be picking up but the clouds hang heavy over the state sector.
"We've inherited a situation where under the previous government the public service grew by 50% over nine years even stopping that growth is a major achievement," says State Services Minister Tony Ryall.
National campaigned on reducing the bureaucracy and set a cap of 38,859 positions which included the core agencies and a number of others such as the Tertiary Education Commission. At the end of last year, the number of positions was down to 37,379.
Ryall says Labour let the bureaucracy run out of control and in nine years the public service grew by 50%.
In October last year, the government said as many as 500 jobs
could go across the ministry and district health boards with a
National Health Board established within the ministry, overseeing
IT, payroll, procurement and logistics.
New figures show that in one year the number of public service jobs
dropped from 38,859 down to 37,379 - a loss of nearly 1,500
jobs.
"You're going to see further reductions in the size of the core
government administration over the next few years," says
Ryall.
Already hit hard are the Inland Revenue, Social Development,
Health, Conservation and the State Services Commission.
"By having the cap we've made savings of about $170 million a year
which can go into front line services," says Ryall.
Jobs have increased in probation and prison services and also at
work and income, and although there've been job losses at Child
Youth and Family the government claims at total of 540 front line
jobs have been created.
But perhaps that is cold comfort for those who have lost their jobs.
"We do know that unemployment in New Zealand is at a 10 year
high so the chances of all of those public servants being able to
find jobs that actually use all the skills they've got are rather
slim," says Brenda Pilot from the Public Service Association.
Would Labour have done this?
"We would have looked at the quality and the need for the staff, it
would have been more about capping and not cutting," says Labour
leader Phil Goff.
Labour Party state services spokesman Grant Robertson says the cap figures are a public relations exercise.
"They created a definition of core government administration and excluded some departments because they knew those departments were going to grow," Robertson says.
"I think National has made a great play of wanting to make creation of jobs and protection of jobs a priority yet they have personally overseen the loss of nearly 1,500 jobs. They are real people, with families, and they have been suffering."
More cuts are coming both to the number of government
departments and their budgets.
"We're working to a plan that we laid out 12 months ago which was
to keep the spending going through the bottom of the recession and
then bring the lid down from the first of July this year," says
Finance Minister Bill English.
English says the reduction in civil servants shows the government is sticking to its plan of maintaining spending during the recession and then bringing the lid down from July this year.
"All these government organisations have had time to think about two things. One is how to provide better services to the public, because the public still wants better service and second is to make them more efficient."
English says he would not guess about how much the public service might shrink overall, though most of the bodies are facing three to five years of budget freezes.
"Each entity is different. In some area numbers have actually gone up, police and Corrections. In other areas in some departments there is room for more efficiencies than others."
