The Finance Minister today singled out the 39 HR departments across the public sector as an example of an operation that could be centralised under the Government’s latest drive to cut back spending.
Trumpeting AI as a means to streamline back-office operations, Nicola Willis told Ryan Bridge TODAY New Zealand’s 39 ministries and government departments all had their own human resources functions, which she would like to see fall under a single system.
“As much as possible, I’d like one centralised system that everyone’s working from instead of duplicating and reinventing the wheel across multiple departments.”
This morning Willis told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking Breakfast she wanted the public service to “get out of the 80s”.
She said AI was “incredible” at slashing the amount of time needed for mundane tasks, revealing her staff used it to write a report on public service reform.
But the Labour Party is criticising the Government’s proposed public service overhaul, saying its “arbitrary” target will hurt Kiwi families.
Willis announced yesterday the Government would reduce the number of departments, increase artificial intelligence use, and cut public servants by nearly 9000 over the next three to five years.
Labour’s spokesperson for public services Camilla Belich told Newstalk ZB’s Early Edition with Ryan Bridge the Government’s target of reducing public servants to about 1% of the population was “arbitrary”.
“We have a significantly larger number of public servants than 1% at the moment.”
Belich said it was unknown how the cuts would affect the services New Zealanders access.
She said the overhaul would affect every region in the country.
“That’s a significant number of jobs that the Government is going to cut at the same time as we’ve got decade-high levels of unemployment.
“This is going to unfortunately hurt Kiwi families and also the businesses that they utilise.”
Willis said the money saved will go into frontline roles, but Belich said there was not enough detail to prove that it would be beneficial.
Public Service Association National Secretary Duane Leo said if there was any fat left in the public service, it has already been trimmed by the government.
“The proposed cuts would be a wrecking ball through services that New Zealanders rely on every single day,” Leo told Ryan Bridge TODAY.
He said after two years of “relentless” restructuring thousands of roles had disappeared.
Employers and Manufacturers Association head of advocacy Alan McDonald said businesses had to downsize their workforce post Covid but the public service never followed suit.
“Think we went up to 63,000 civil servants, we’re still at nearly 63,000 so there hasn’t been the cuts that were promised two years ago.”
He said artificial intelligence could do some back office roles.
Meanwhile Act’s David Seymour said the 8700 roles to be cut did not mean all those people would never work again.
“Three thousand people change jobs in New Zealand every day and you’re going to see a transfer of wealth over a long period of time from the public sector, which will become more efficient like it was 10 years ago, into the private sector where there’s going to be more job creation and opportunity.”
The Green party’s Chlöe Swarbrick labelled the move as “an age of Government GPT”.
“This government has simply gone ‘we want to make cuts’, they can’t tell New Zealanders where those cuts are going to be made.
“We hear a lot of fancy words right now about efficiency and how automation is apparently going to solve all of our problems but for any New Zealander who has had trouble with dealing with automated helplines of AI or a chatbot, welcome to the age of government GPT.”