Andrew Dickens: Is the Government counting its chickens before they hatch?

Let's start with the big story of the day: the Finance Minister yesterday unveiling a major plan to shrink the public service. It's putting thousands of jobs on the line, but it is booking, potentially, billion-dollar savings into this year's Budget. So the interesting thing about her announcement —there were precursors to this, so this is stuff we knew, but it's all brought it into focus— is the pure numbers that we're talking about.

David Farrar: Useful context on public sector job cuts

The Herald reports:

From the gory details of job-cuts news, you’d think the public service was being eviscerated.

While the media’s view of the cuts is incomplete, it’s also true that departments have been leaking the particulars faster than a Wellington water pipe (and to be fair, formal update announcements have also commenced).

Kerre Woodham: Did we actually need the public service increase?

Back in 2022, Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr was appearing before a Parliamentary Select Committee trying to explain how and why the bank was too slow in moving the OCR and therefore increasing interest rates. He was asked by Parliamentary Select Committee member Chloe Swarbrick whether the Reserve Bank was deliberately engineering a recession to rein back inflation.