Absolute insanity

The government's contracting out of the education payroll to Novopay has been a disaster, with hundreds of people going unpaid, often for months. The Ministry of Education's payroll office has been working hard to try and clean up the mess its contractors had made. or at least it was - because now the government is sacking them:

The Ministry of Education is planning to cut nine jobs from its payroll unit as staff struggle to deal with the Novopay teachers' pay debacle.

PSA national secretary Brenda Pilott said a restructuring proposal would reduce the number of positions from 23 to 14.

"It claims the staff will not be needed once Novopay is operating smoothly. The timing of this beggar's belief," she said.

"Everyone knows that the Novopay system has been a debacle and with the magnitude of the problems, who knows when it will be properly up and running."

To do this now, when the new system is still not functioning, is absolute insanity. And it just makes the government look callous and utterly divorced from reality.