‘Brutal’ job cuts proposed at Ministry for Pacific Peoples
The Ministry for Pacific Peoples (MPP) is looking to slash its workforce by 40% in a proposal labelled as “brutal”.
It has proposed to disestablish 63 roles. This is comprised of 31 vacant roles and 32 staffed roles. MPP has a workforce of about 156 staff, including vacant positions.
It will be offering voluntary redundancies, and it still has a pause on recruitment.
Public Service Association national secretary Duane Leo said a cut of that size would be “brutal”, at a ministry that “carries out a very important role by being a bridge between the Government and Pasifika communities, and particularly hard to reach groups”.
“The 40% reduction is going to have a huge impact on a small ministry serving a population of about 400,000 Pasifika people in New Zealand, many of whom have close links across the Pacific.”
The ministry has been asked to save 7.5% by the Government. Final decisions will be made at the end of April, and implemented in July.
“We remain committed to championing the voices of Pacific communities, and maintaining programmes that help to empower Pacific peoples to thrive is our priority,” a ministry spokesperson said.
“We are confident that the proposed changes to our structure will enable us to remain closely connected to and support Pacific communities throughout the country.”
The ministry already disestablished 10 jobs after a restructure at the end of last year.
MPP was shoved sharply into the spotlight last year, after more than $40,000 of taxpayers’ money was spent on a farewell for its departing chief executive.
Following the media coverage, staff were left rattled after two men entered the ministry and harassed workers with questions about spending.
It was among the ministries ACT leader David Seymour pledged to abolish, drawing controversy when he told Newstalk ZB that “in my fantasy, we’d send a guy called Guy
Fawkes in there and it’d be all over”.
At Parliament on Tuesday, Labour’s finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds asked Finance Minister Nicola Willis if she was confident that none of the changes proposed to a string of ministries, including MPP, would affect frontline services.
“That is the expectation we have conveyed to chief executives,” Willis said.
The minister said there was a “strong case for improving the delivery of frontline services”.
“We are not going to ban ourselves from looking at other ways we could do things better, differently, so that we can ensure the resources we are deploying have a bigger impact for the people we are seeking to serve.”
Treasury
New Zealand’s Treasury, which manages the Government’s finances, is working on a “managed reduction” to its workforce.
A spokesperson told The Post it was doing this through a “combination of removing vacancies, reducing the number of fixedterm roles as contracts come to an end, and attrition”.
“We will also be making savings through reduction in spend on contractors and consultants, as well as organisation-wide costs such as travel, training and consumables.”
Ministry for the Environment (MfE)
Staff have been told that redundancies are likely, even after slashing senior environment management positions by a quarter last December.
The ministry had advised staff “that it is probable that we will need to go through a process to resize our organisation in line with the Government’s financial savings targets and our decreasing baseline, and that redundancies are likely as a result”, a spokesperson said. “We won’t know how many roles may be impacted until the Government finalises its Budget 2024 at the end of May.”
Customs
Customs is going through its existing vacancies to decide which positions can be disestablished. It comes after The Post reported it offered voluntary redundancy or early retirement to 34 staff members.
Customs opened expressions of interest for voluntary redundancies or early retirement in February, during an all-staff virtual meeting about meeting cost pressures and savings. There were 117 expressions of interest in taking up the offer.
“Most of the applications declined were related to positions Customs needs to retain to ensure our border services are not impacted,“a spokesperson said.