Government Size Reduction

But as much as I love this proposal, I am worried. Because I have the feeling that I just can't I just cannot shake the feeling that this coalition may not go through with this promise. Because this is the second time that they've made this promise. Before the last election, Act was saying they were going to cut 14,000 public servants. Have they cut 14,000 public servants? No, they haven't. Haven't done it. And if it feels today's announcement, it feels a little bit like today's announcement's been dreamt up over the weekend, because there's no actual plan here. There's just an announcement. And the announcement is that the public service is going to be asked to design its own downsizing. So it feels a bit on the fly. And also it's a week before the budget, which makes you wonder if this has been announced just so Treasury can take out 9,000 public servants from the government's payroll when they start doing budget forecasts for next week, thereby putting the government's books in better shape and maybe bringing the surplus forward a little bit. Do you see what I'm doing here? Maybe this is all just designed to look better than it actually will be, once bitten twice shy. But it's a hell of a big risk for National to take to commit to something like this in public and then not do it. So I've got my fingers crossed. This may just be the start of unwinding years of public bloat.