When National embarked on slash and burn cuts to the public service, Prime Minister Chris Luxon was clear that he expected frontline services to be protected. He lied:
The government has scrapped part of a work programme designed to prevent people ending up in emergency housing because the social development ministry cannot cope with the workload, official documents show.Another way of saying "oversubscribed" is "understaffed". And its worth noting that MSD cut 700 roles last May to meet National's arbitrary bodycount targets. And now they can't do the basic stuff the government asks them to do.A December MSD report to Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka said that was partly because it was too busy with work related to changes to the Jobseeker benefit.
[...]
"We do not recommend progressing further with phase one work at this time due to insufficient frontline capacity and wider organisational pressures," the report said.
"MSD's frontline capacity is currently oversubscribed, and there are wider organisational pressures because of the focus on implementing initiatives to support other government targets, including the Jobseeker target."
This is what cuts give us: a dysfunctional public sector which can no longer perform basic functions. And that's fine with National, because its not like a Minister paid $304,300 a year or any of their rich wanker Koru Club friends think they will ever need those functions. Instead, they're happy to make everything suck for the rest of us, so they can posture as "fiscally responsible" and hand over billions in cash to landlords.
Wouldn't it be nice to have politicians who actually represented New Zealanders, rather than rich people?
