Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: This Government's all talk, bugger all action

This morning, the Prime Minister was asked about the 2000 public servants that had lost their jobs. 2000 are out but 64,000 remain.

Chris Luxon saw nothing wrong with that.  

That right there is part of the reason why this Government is polling so poorly, because it's all talk, isn't it, bugger all action.

Now I'm sorry. I realize this is a lot to start the week with - we're starting strident.

I don't mean to continue like that - but were you as surprised as I was to hear that we've only cut 2000 public servants? And were you even more surprised that the Prime Minister's explanation is no more than a verbal shrug?

This, I think, will be profoundly disappointing to a lot of people who expected this Government to get public spending under control. And cutting public servants is part of getting that spending under control.

There is no reason why we have as many public servants as we have today. 63,000 - there is no reason why we have more than double the 30,000 public servants that we had in 2001.

Our population hasn't doubled since 2001. It's gone up about 37 percent. If you adjust accordingly, then we should have 41,000 public servants, not 63,000 public servants.

Now, I would have expected that the Prime Minister would have a better explanation than simply saying - at least it's not as bad as Labour.

Well, maybe so, but I hoped for better. I hoped for a Government that was gonna actually turn this around. Certainly more than a Government that just feels like it's actually Labour dressed in blue clothing.

And isn't this just the latest example of talk from this Government that is not being matched by action? They promised to cut spending every year, and they spend more than Grant Robertson. They promise to get on top of debt every year, and they add more to the debt.

They promise to stop the race-based policies - and we just keep finding them. They keep waving them through unless we bust them at it.

I think this, in part, answers the question that we were asking last week, which is why is it that 3 polls in a row were so tight that it wasn't actually clear if this Government would win an election if an election was held today.

This is why they're not brave enough. They should be braver. In fact, if they were braver, they might be more popular. It's worth remembering that for all the hard decisions that were taken by the 4th Labour Government, which is definitely the most transformational that we can think of, right?

For all those tough decisions taken in the first 3 years, they actually came back with a bigger majority in 1987.

So maybe, you get rewarded for doing what you say you'll do, tough as it may be, rather than just talking tough and then doing very little.

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