Wellington mayor Andrew Little has confirmed he will sit down with Finance Minister Nicola Willis on 12 June, weeks after a pre-Budget announcement of 8,700 public service job cuts caught him off guard and intensified anxiety about the capital’s economic future.
The meeting was arranged in the wake of Willis’s pre-Budget speech, in which she revealed the core public service would be reduced from around 63,600 staff today to roughly 55,000 by mid-2029. According to a 1News report on the pre-Budget speech, the plan involves agency mergers, operating budget cuts spread across three years, and what the finance minister described as accelerated use of artificial intelligence and digital tools. Willis said the changes would free up about $2.4 billion to be redirected to health, education and infrastructure.
Speaking to RNZ, Andrew Little said he had no warning the announcement was coming and that he had publicly called for talks before Willis’s office agreed to the June date. “I wasn’t aware of it before it was made. Yes, it was a surprise,” he said.
Little is no political novice. He led Labour from 2014 to 2017, served as a senior minister in Jacinda Ardern’s government, and is now in his first term as mayor of a city whose economy is built around the public service. Wellington’s core public sector workforce numbers in the tens of thousands, and the prospect of thousands of those roles disappearing over three years has put both the council and local businesses on edge.
What set Little’s response apart was that he did not simply criticise the government. He used the moment to argue Wellington’s own technology firms should be treated as part of the solution. He told RNZ the city already had what he called a strong GovTech sector, made up of companies that understood both government processes and modern digital tools.
“We have a very strong tech sector, including a GovTech sector, businesses who understand government and understand modern technology, including AI, and how that can assist the government to improve services and create efficiency,” Little said.
He estimated Wellington’s tech ecosystem already contributed about $2 billion to the regional economy and employed around 2,000 people, pointing to Xero as the best-known example of a homegrown firm that had scaled internationally. He named Sharesies, Hnry and PartsTrader as newer entrants and said he was not worried about them following Xero overseas. “They stay because the support system is here and the community is here,” he said.
The mayor also took aim at the way the government has been talking about AI. Little said ministers had spoken for years about modernising government technology, but argued the recent references to AI as a driver of savings lacked detail. “It’s not clear what ministers mean when they say they want to use more AI in government because that on its own is a pretty meaningless statement,” he said.
He pushed back specifically against comments from Public Service Minister Paul Goldsmith, who had questioned whether New Zealand had AI companies operating at the scale of global platforms such as Claude or Copilot. Little said that framing missed the point. The issue, he argued, was not whether Wellington could build the next global AI engine, but whether local firms could improve how government services were designed and delivered. “It’s about the service offering, how government departments can make things easier for residents, taxpayers and people interacting with them,” he said.
Little acknowledged the tech sector remained much smaller than the city’s public sector workforce, and that the next three years would test how many displaced workers could move into private sector or creative industry roles. He said some of that talent already sat inside government agencies. “The foundations are here for some really exciting times ahead in terms of boosting businesses and providing alternatives to work that might otherwise be done in the public sector,” he said.
For her part, Willis has framed the cuts as overdue modernisation rather than austerity. She told 1News’s Breakfast programme that much of the reduction would come from natural attrition rather than redundancy, saying, “This isn’t all people being given a ‘don’t come Monday’.” She added that the public service could not “keep the same structure we’ve had since the 80s and say that will work in 2036”.
Willis also conceded the government had not modelled the impact of the cuts on benefit numbers, telling Breakfast it would rely on broader labour market trends and that she had confidence many former public servants would “find exciting jobs in the private sector”. Opposition leader Chris Hipkins has warned that cutting at this scale without hitting frontline services is not possible, while coalition partner ACT has argued the cuts do not go far enough.
The 12 June meeting will be the first formal chance for Wellington’s mayor to put numbers and a timeline to ministers, and to test whether the government’s pitch about a more digital, leaner public service has room in it for the capital’s own tech sector to play a role.
How do you think the public service shake-up will land in Wellington, and is Andrew Little right that local tech firms are part of the answer? Have your say in the comments. With a general election later in 2026, you can also check out our interactive voting tool to see which parties best match your views.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply