The framing of this story right from the start is disingenuous. The Microsoft job losses are explicitly reported as "part of a broader strategy to streamline operations and accelerate its AI initiatives." Immediately followed by reporting that Health NZ (rebranded from Te Whatu Ora) is cutting a third of its IT staff. The implication being that it's the same reason.
It's not. The current NZ government is working through the "Starve the Beast" strategy; intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".
RNZ's service to the right wing side of the political spectrum hasn't saved them though, they're having funding cut too [0].
That's a different government. From yours and the other replies, I see it is just a conspiracy theory. Of course it's possible for a government to reduce funding for departments to save money without the goal of privatizing them.
It is no conspiracy theory to simply observe what is happening whenever a right wing government leads a country long enough: the public services are enshittified to the point they lose any support from the population which justify them to partly or completely replace them with the false idea that competition among private companies will lead to better service.
Right-wing party platforms aren't a conspiracy theory, it's literally their platform.
"Starve the beast" isn't something the left made up to point and laugh at the right, it's just what the right does because they legitimately believe it works. And, in very rare cases, it does. But usually, privatizing just makes costs explode and inefficiency go through the roof as systems become horribly fragmented and opaque.
> It's not. The current NZ government is working through the "Starve the Beast" strategy; intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".
In case HN readers see this and take it too seriously, this is a left wing conspiracy theory. The government is making cutbacks because the previous government spent money like it was going out of style and put our country in a very precarious position.
> the previous government spent money like it was going out of style and put our country in a very precarious position.
The NZ external debt has been about about the same rate for a decade [0]. External debt has increased at about 2% per year, and the rate has been consistent under both the right and the left.
It's weird - the right consistently pushes "we are better economic managers than the left". There is stuff all evidence for either side being better managers. When the right pushes up debt, it seems to be by giving away tax breaks, usually to the rich. When the left pushes up debt seems to be by spending more, usually on the poor.
It's not the outright debt it's the acceleration in spending. It was completely unsustainable. We are borrowing in order to fund our day to day activities, which is definitionally precarious.
According to your posting history you don't even live in New Zealand. I doubt you have the first clue what is going on here.
If the article is correct there is nothing special about what happened in NZ. It says the "sea of red ink" was driven by COVID spending. The same thing happened happened everywhere, regardless of which side was in power. Those NZ COVID spending measures almost certainly were legislated to expire in a few years, just like everywhere else. But yes, it left NZ with increased government debt, again just like everywhere else.
You Kiwi's aren't as special as it seems you think you are. That was my point really - fiscal responsibility is always a right wing talking point. And completely true to form, the current right wing NZ government delivered tax cuts in their last budget. They say it was funded by the sort of spending reductions we are discussing here. I see those tax cuts benefited the poor rather than the rich. Colour me impressed.
And the leaked storyline for Episode Three looking really strong as well.
I hold out hope that the Crowbar Collective (the group that remade Half-Life with the Source engine and called it Black Mesa) have been secretly working on implementing the Episode Three storyline in Source. Though, now that Source2 is out who knows? This is all my speculation anyway.
That's terrific. I was worried that it was going to end at the terse OP, but the follow-up post has just the kind of play-by-play details that I can't get enough of in debugging stories.
> We very much do "look up" and have been for decades.
In case you didn't pick it up, Don't Look Up is a callout to a recent movie [1]. I imagine that in this context it's more of a comment on the appetite of the population at large to undergo the temporary inconvenience of proactively taking the power-grid, and thus the vulnerable transformers, offline prior to the arrival of the event. We know the scientists will be looking up; it's the convincing of the population at large via a capitalist captured media that's the hard part.
I am very much aware of the reference. I'm also aware that it's just a movie with a barely concealed and really trivialising climate change allegory. In reality we're just out of a pandemic that showed governments around the globe stopping people's daily life for months by decree without much problem. Switching electricity off for a few days is nothing.
It's not. The current NZ government is working through the "Starve the Beast" strategy; intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".
RNZ's service to the right wing side of the political spectrum hasn't saved them though, they're having funding cut too [0].
[0] https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360698953/funding-cut-rnz-m...