ANZ has put a proposal to its Dunedin staff that would close the city’s contact centre and shrink 15 customer-facing roles down to two, with the work shifted to larger offices in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
The proposal was reported by RNZ on Friday afternoon, which understood that staff had been briefed a fortnight earlier and that about 40 people work at the Dunedin ANZ site. On those numbers, more than a third of the roles at the site would go. Consultation is still open, so nothing is final, but the shape of the plan is clear enough that the union representing the workers has already started arguing against it.
ANZ has said very little. In a statement the bank said, “We are consulting with a small number of staff on the proposed changes and exploring all available options, including redeployment opportunities where possible. Our immediate priority is supporting our people through this process. As this is an active consultation process, we are unable to comment further at this stage.” A spokesman told the Otago Daily Times the bank was “proposing to bring our contact centre work together into our established hubs in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington”.
That phrasing does a lot of work. Consolidation is the standard justification for closing a small site, and on paper it is hard to argue with. Contact centre work is routed by software, not geography. A call answered in Dunedin and a call answered in Christchurch look identical on a dashboard. The counter-argument, which First Union has made, is that the Dunedin site was not costing the bank anything unusual to run in the first place.
First Union co-organiser Angus Wilson told the ODT it was “extremely sad and it’s extremely disappointing to see that ANZ are going ahead with this plan”. He said “a lot of our membership aren’t in a position to be able to uproot their lives and move to Christchurch”, and added that “this contact centre is not a loss-leader. There’s no cost involved in keeping it going.”
Redeployment is the part of the proposal most likely to fall over in practice. Being offered a role in Auckland is not the same as being offered a role. For a worker on a contact centre wage with a mortgage in Dunedin, a family and a partner in local work, a transfer to a city where housing costs far more is a theoretical option rather than a real one. Two of the affected staff have been offered something local. The rest are being asked to choose between moving and leaving.
Labour’s Taieri MP Ingrid Leary made that point to RNZ. “Only two affected staff have been offered redeployment in Dunedin,” she said. “For the others, relocating is not a realistic option when their families, homes and lives are here.” She linked the proposal to other recent losses in the city, saying it followed “the loss of more than 60 jobs from the Gregg’s and Ravensdown sites, with further cuts looming elsewhere”, and that “filled jobs across Dunedin fell over the past year, yet the Government still has no credible plan to support employment and economic development in our city”.
The Gregg’s reference is to the Dunedin coffee factory, which Heinz Wattie’s confirmed in March would close as part of a wider decision affecting about 300 roles across several of its sites. Gregg’s had been in Dunedin since the nineteenth century. Dunedin Mayor Sophie Barker said at the time that it was “a huge loss of part of our cultural landscape … it’s something that’s always been there”.
Individually these are small numbers. Thirteen roles is not a plant closure. But small provincial cities do not lose employment in single large events very often. They lose it fifteen roles at a time, in decisions made in head offices where the local effect is a rounding error and the saving is real. A contact centre is one of the few kinds of white collar work that can plausibly sit anywhere in the country, which makes it valuable to a city like Dunedin and easy for a bank to move.
The financial backdrop is worth stating plainly. ANZ New Zealand reported a cash net profit after tax of $1.238 billion for the six months to 31 March, up 2 percent, with statutory profit of $1.259 billion. Chief executive Antonia Watson called it “a solid and consistent performance in a very competitive market, which is important in times like these”. The Dunedin proposal will not move that number in any direction a shareholder would notice.
It does, though, sit inside a much larger restructure. In September last year ANZ’s Australian parent announced it would cut about 3,500 roles and around 1,000 contractors over the following year, taking roughly $560 million in restructuring charges. Group chief executive Nuno Matos said at the time, “This is not about profits, this is about getting the things right.” Reporting on that announcement noted that branches, call centres and most complaints teams would largely be spared. A year on, the deadline the group set itself falls this month, and a New Zealand call centre is the thing on the table.
None of this is happening in a strong labour market. Unemployment rose to 5.6 percent in the June 2026 quarter, its highest in years, which means anyone made redundant in Dunedin is looking for work in a market with more competition than it had a year ago. It also lands while the banks are already under scrutiny for shrinking their physical presence, with ATM numbers down sharply over the past decade and the Reserve Bank weighing a minimum standard for cash services.
Consultation has not closed, and proposals of this kind do occasionally change. What usually changes is the detail rather than the direction. If it proceeds as put, Dunedin loses another small block of steady, skilled, non-seasonal work, and the people in it get to choose between a city they did not plan to move to and no job at all.
What do you think? Have you worked in a contact centre or seen a workplace consolidated out of your town? Leave a comment below and tell us how it played out.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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