The human cost of governing by spreadsheet | The Spinoff:
What is actually being done away with is not inefficiency. What is being done away with is us.
National ministers Nicola Willis and Paul Goldsmith announced this week that the government intends to reduce the core public service … through mergers, digitisation, AI tools and spending caps. The stated rationale is returning staffing to pre-2017 levels. This implies the country has simply been running excessive paperwork for the past nine years and that the solution is obvious. The implied logic of these cuts is that 9,000 people were essentially surplus. Warm bodies occupying desks, processing nothing, contributing nothing, simply drawing salaries while the real work happened around them. It is an extraordinary claim. And no evidence has seriously been offered, let alone proved.