Larry Williams Drive

As you’d expect, I’m a huge fan of Nicola Willis’ plan to cut down the size of the public sector. This is the second issue I’ve been harping on about to her. The other one was, obviously, the fees-free year for university students. So I’m stoked that, on this show, we’re two from two in terms of agitating for cutting back on wasteful public spending. The public service in this country is too big. There are 63,000 public servants. There were only around 47,000 when Jacinda and Grant started throwing money around. We have 39 Government departments and ministries. Ireland has 18. Australia has 16. We have 39. We have Government departments like the Ministry for Women that don’t appear to do anything other than write reports and make work for themselves. Now, anyone arguing against cutting back public servants - and there are some people doing this - needs to explain why. And if the answer is, “Oh, because it’s someone’s job,” well, that is not an answer. Because if it’s a job we don’t need, but we keep it just t