Frontline Vs Back-Office Spending

No, I mean, basically what happened in under the Labor government from 2017 to 2023, you had a massive growth in the public service. So it went from like 47,000 people to 65,000 people, and that was like three times faster than the growth in the total workforce. And the problem with a little bit of what you've just highlighted is that there was 46% growth and actually what we call the back office, the support and administration functions. And there was only 18% growth over that six year period in the frontline services. So what Nicola Willis and I've been doing is actually going through the government spending and trying to cut all the back office stuff and actually take those savings and then put them into the frontline services. Think police think, you know, defence, think um, you know, doctors, nurses, uh, teachers, uh, all of that kind of stuff. So, you know, we've really just got to say, look, we've got to get the public service right size, but actually, what's the goal here? Is it you know, we want the public service to you know really serve the public of New Zealand well. We want it to be easy to deal with government. It's too inefficient, it needs to be more effective, um, and we want it to be a great place ultimately for people to work into.