The finance minister and public service commissioner’s handling of the public service cuts inspires The Spinoff’s human capital, Veronica Schmidt, to change her identity and reframe her past. 

In a complicated world, sometimes your identity can become murky and you can lose sight of who you really are. Until I listened to public service commissioner Sir Brian Roche on RNZ this morning, I had the existential questions we all do: Who am I? What’s my value? Is there a point to this life? 

As Roche talked though, the mists cleared and a shaft of light illuminated my existence. Speaking about the recently announced 8,700 job cuts coming for the public service, which Roche will be responsible for executing, he told John Campbell: “It’s regrettable that this is going to occur, but change does require it being made – and there will be an impact on human capital.”

There it was, as clear as day, a new way for me, a wage earner, to identify: I am human capital. 

This was not my first lightbulb moment of the week. On Wednesday, I listened, breathless, as finance minister Nicola Willis, who had announced the public service cuts ahead of next week’s budget, talked to Ingrid Hipkiss on RNZ. 

Willis: Public servants – they want to modernise too. They are smart cookies and they know it can be done better.

Hipkiss: So you’re expecting them to take this as a positive?

Willis: Absolutely! That’s why we’re saying to them, you lead the charge. We think we can streamline this. You tell us how it should come together in a way that makes more logical sense.

Hipkiss: You tell us how to lose some jobs of your colleagues, maybe do yourself out of a job, combine with someone else, save some more money, bring in AI, streamline the tasks, do a merger, report in quarterly, carry on doing the work you’re doing, do it really well for less money?

Willis: That’s right.

What a revelation. In my career, I’ve had to make people redundant. Suddenly, I realised I had entirely misread every one of those restructure meetings. I had sat in non-descript meeting rooms, a tissue box on the table between me and the human capital, trying to be sensitive. 

I had looked into the watering eyes of the human capital and thought it was worrying about its mortgage, how it would feed its children, what would happen to its abruptly upended career path. Now, all of the guilt and empathy melted away. The whole time, the human capital was hoping that I would prioritise efficiency and replace it with AI. 

I already knew that in tough times, tough decisions have to be made. But this week, thanks to Roche and Willis, I (human capital) now know, no matter the extent of the cuts, no matter the difficulty of the decision, there’s no excuse for executing them with sensitivity.