A new plan for Aotearoa: The speech Nicola Willis should have given

In the small court of Luxonia this week, Nicola Willis, Paul Goldsmith and David Seymour picked the ‘bloated’ public sector for the guillotine. Armed with a pre-Budget decree to axe 8,700 positions and shrink the core headcount back down to 55,000, they argued for a smaller, cheaper, more AI-enabled government. The objective did not signal the end of the world as we know it, but it was one of the worst examples of political communication I’ve read in a long time. It spread unhelpful panic throughout the public service at a time the government needs them on its side.

This is the alternative speech an in-tune Minister of Finance should have made to excite rather than spook the crowd. Note, the initiatives in this speech are not current government policy. I’ve made them up. But they should be!

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I want to start with a story.

In 1908 the New Zealand Post and Telegraph Department bought its very first motor vehicle. Within just a few years, major cities like Wellington had completely replaced horse-and-cart mail delivery with trucks and motorcycles. Rural delivery quickly followed suit. Within fifteen years, almost all the jobs of those managing horse and cart mail delivery systems were gone. Not because the government decided to cut them, but because the automobile arrived, and the work changed.

Nobody hearing this today thinks that was a tragedy. We look back and call it progress.

I am here today because we are standing at an identical moment. And I want to talk to you about what that means – not just for next week’s budget, but for every New Zealander who relies on public services, and for every public servant who delivers them.

The honest picture

Treasury has told me something that no responsible Finance Minister can ignore. Under current settings, pension and health spending will grow faster than tax revenue. The gap is growing, and it will define the choices available to every New Zealand government for the next twenty years.

This National government will not close that gap by raising taxes. And we will not close it by cutting the frontline services New Zealanders depend on – nurses, teachers, police, the people who show up every day to hold this country together.

So we have to do something harder and more interesting than either of those options. We have to reduce government expenditure while also becoming dramatically smarter. The gap we have calculated we need to fill in the next four years is $2.4 billion. It sounds a lot, and it is, but we have a plan for how to do it.

New Zealand has always punched above its weight. For a small population we possess extraordinary talent and extraordinary creativity. But we have always faced a few structural disadvantages, including our distance from key markets and the high infrastructure costs of a country geographically the size of the United Kingdom with the population of a mid-sized Australian city. We have had to be ingenious just to survive.

AI changes that equation. For the first time in our history, distance and geography are irrelevant to a growing category of high-value work. A small team with the right tools can now do what previously required an organisation many times its size.

The drudgery of process – the form-filling, the cross-checking, the priority management, the paperwork that consumes so many hours in both the public and private sectors. It can all be automated, freeing human beings to do the work that actually requires being human.

Today, National is committing to making the New Zealand government an AI-led government. Not as a slogan. As a plan.

Starting with ourselves

The plan starts with Cabinet.

Between the time of the last National-led government and today the number of public servants has grown by about a third, but the number of ministerial portfolios has doubled from 46 to 81.

While every portfolio has a purpose, what this growth means in practice is that ministers are stretched impossibly thin, officials are pulled in competing directions, and the public service spends way too much time and resource on internal coordination that should be spent on serving New Zealanders.

Cabinet is therefore taking the lead by reducing its own portfolio count to 40. We are streamlining ministerial responsibilities around outcomes that really matter. We are setting a discipline on our own appetite for new initiatives, new reviews, new legislation, new agencies, new reporting requirements. If we want a public service that genuinely serves the public, we have to generate less work for it. That commitment starts today, with us.

A word about trust

I am aware of the perception – sometimes fair, sometimes not – that National is an anti-public service political party. That we see public servants as a problem to be managed rather than a resource to be valued.

I want to address that directly. Not with words, but with a promise. Judge us by what we deliver. Not by this speech, not by the Budget documents, but by whether, at the end of our next term in office, the public service is more capable, better equipped, more trusted, and more proud of its work than it is today. That is the test I am setting for this government, and I am inviting every public servant in New Zealand to hold us to it.

Because here is what I genuinely believe. A strong public service is not the enemy of a strong economy. It is a precondition for one. The countries with the most productive economies – the ones that attract investment, that innovate, that take care of their people – also have public services that function well. That is not a coincidence. Capable government and a thriving private sector are not opposites. They are partners. And it is time we started acting like it.

What this means for public servants

I know what people are reading. I know the headlines about AI taking jobs. I understand this is unsettling.

Let me be honest with you. Just like Cabinet is reducing its number of portfolios, we are going to have to reduce the size of the public service. It has grown too big. I’d like to see it around 1% of the population of New Zealand. It’s currently sitting at 1.2%.

But we’re not going to do this by slashing jobs.

The core public service currently employs around 63,000 people. Natural attrition, which means retirements, resignations and career moves, runs at roughly ten percent annually. That means, without a single forced redundancy, thousands of roles naturally turn over every year. If we didn’t replace all these people we would make our required savings with change to spare.

But we don’t need to go that far. This government wants to take the opportunity brought about by attrition to stimulate technological transformation.

Every role that falls vacant through natural attrition will be assessed thoughtfully – not to eliminate it necessarily, but to ask the right question: is this the best use of a human being? Or is this the kind of work that automation can now handle better, faster, and more consistently – freeing a person to do something that actually needs a person?

Because here is the truth about what AI does best. It handles volume. It handles repetition. It handles the transactions, the form-checking, the data-matching, the routine correspondence that currently consumes hours of talented people's working days.

What it cannot do is exercise judgement in a complex human situation. It cannot build the trust that sits at the heart of every meaningful interaction between a government and a citizen.

That is the work we want more of. Not less.

The investment we are making

None of this happens without investment, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it will cost less than people think.

We are creating a ringfenced transformation fund for public sector AI deployment. The private sector is already standing up projects for five figures or less that can be prototyped and evaluated in weeks rather than years, creating savings in the magnitude of ten times or more.

We are going to overhaul our procurement rules so that agencies can access AI solutions faster. We are accepting that some trials will not work, and we are giving public servants explicit permission to experiment without fear that a well-intentioned failure becomes a career-ending headline.

And here’s the transformational commitment we’re making. We are going to upskill every core public servant in AI – from the front desk to the back office. Not because we expect everyone to become a technologist, but because we expect everyone to understand the tools now available to them.

And we are doing this because the people who best understand where the waste is, where the bottlenecks are, where citizens fall through the gaps – those people are already in the public service. Their knowledge is not an obstacle to this transformation. It is the engine of it.

The invitation

I want to close with something that is not in the Budget papers.

Public service is one of the most important things a person can do with their working life. The people who keep our courts running, who process the benefit that stops a family falling apart, who answer the call at two in the morning, who write the curricula that educate our tamariki – those people matter. What they do matters. And for too long the political conversation in this country has treated them as a line item rather than as the backbone of a functioning society.

That changes today.

Every public servant who has ever sat at their desk thinking – there has to be a better way to do this – this is your moment. We are not coming to you with a restructure imposed from above. We are coming to you with an invitation from beside. Show us where the drudgery is. Show us where the process gets in the way of the person. Show us where a better tool would let you spend more time on the work that only you can do.

Because the future we are describing is a more powerful public service. Where public servants are not the punchline of a political joke but the architects of a smart country that works.

The New Zealand Story

For most of New Zealand’s history we have told a story about the importance of infrastructure and primary exports to the economy, and they will remain so. But they are not a technology strategy on their own. This government is committing to both – the economy built by hand, and the economy built by mind. Because the investment in people and the investment in infrastructure are not alternatives. They are complements. A more capable, digitally confident workforce lifts every sector.

The horse-and-cart workers of 1908 did not disappear from New Zealand's economy. They became mechanics, engineers, road builders, the people who built a modern Aotearoa. The work changed. The need for skilled, committed, ingenious people did not.

New Zealand's need for a public service that is capable, trusted, and focused on the people it serves has never been greater. Our job is to give you the tools to meet that need.

That is what today is about. I’m genuinely excited for us become an AI-led government. I hope you will be too.

Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini (My success is not mine alone, but the success of many.)

For Erica Cumming, in loving memory