How Many Government Employees Does NZ Have?
The government has grown by nearly a 3rd since Labour took power
As at 30 June 2022, there were the equivalent of 60,381 full-time public servants working in New Zealand, which is 27.8% more than in 2017 when Labour came to power1.
Since total actual filled jobs in the June 2022 quarter was 2.19 million2, that means that at June 2021, about 3% of the working population were government employees. However the reality of the situation is that the actual number will be a lot higher than that because this likely doesn't include all the contractors and companies that exist primarily to serve the government with services such as policy advice, IT services or engineering services.
Opinion
My feeling on the matter is that it seems unreasonable that for every 35 people in NZ, there's a dedicated government worker overseeing or doing something3 and that of those 35 people, some of them would likely be serving as that government worker's assistant.
Regardless of the situation, I would expect that with more than one person looking after the needs of such as small group, the group's needs would be met extremely well...
I put the word “something” in italic facetiously because a government that is too large is inefficient in both cost (it’s expensive) and output (it’s my belief that larger governments tend to get less done). Additionally, if you look at this government’s success rate, it has performed poorly in almost all its endeavors.
Each time I publish one of these articles I like to find an appropriate image from Google Images to use as the icon for the article. I search Google Images because I'm not an artist and things that other people have created are often better than anything I could have come up with.
What amused me with this article was that when I did a Google Image search for "government too large" and "overbearing government", one search came back with a Wikipedia article about the current NZ government and the other search returned various pictures of Jacinda, Winston (who was part of the first coallition in 2017) and Chris Hipkins.