Is the Nicola Willis public service announcement to be admired or condemned? 

I think the former, on balance. 

They should have done it properly two years ago and they didn’t, hence they probably should not be back here now, unless this was their Machiavellian plan all along. 

Two public service haircuts a term. But assuming that wasn’t it, we go back to a lost opportunity that could be in the rear vision mirror by now. 

What they talked was a big game. What they delivered was a surgical whimper. 

Yes, it is always sad to lose jobs and restructure and cut. But few outside the Wellington bubble would argue with the fact that the growth engine of public service work was absurd and 65,000 is a city, not a workforce. 

To make it worse, they got the same headlines and noise and pushback over a couple of thousand cuts as they would have ten times that. 

So we are back for another crack, driven by necessity. 

That’s the bit to be admired. 

Laying lots of people off in election year is not really a vote-getter 

Mind you it's safe, I think, to say most of the public service aren't conservatives so the vote loss, you'd guess, will be minimal. 

It’s a horrible thing working in an environment where your future is part of the political wind. I faced it at TVNZ and Radio NZ. Whoever woke up on what side of the bed had some effect on what you were paid and whether you were hanging around for a while. 

It's no way to have a job. 

And in that sense, you can blame the Labour Government for stacking the place with well-paid work. And yet as you applied, if you thought about it, surely it couldn’t last, and it hasn’t. 

As the unions bleat, this is not about the public service and its value. They do a lot of good things and a lot of vital things. 

There are a lot of very capable, if not talented, people in the mix. But it’s the extra, the excess and the fat that needs the trimming. 

This is fiscally desperate to a degree – an operating allowance of $2.1 billion and savings from anywhere and everywhere. 

You can't accuse the Government of priming the pumps. The pumps don’t work because "the vandals took the handles", if you know your Bob Dylan. 

The point is slashing spending and killing jobs is not your traditional electioneering. That's to be admired.