New Zealand’s Acting Prime Minister David Seymour is making no apologies for supporting the Ministry of Justice’s propose to cut 175 jobs.

The ministry has begun consulting with staff on a change proposal aimed at making “significant savings”.

In an interview with chrislynchmedia.com Seymour said “the previous government hired a huge number of people, 18,000 additional public servants, not frontline people, but public servants, and they actually managed to get worse results.

“For example, If you look at the likelihood of a New Zealander being victimised, that actually went up about 30% over the last five years, even as they hired more people to supposedly do something about it.

“So first and foremost, we’ve got to separate the idea that throwing money at a problem and hiring people for a problem is the same as solving it. Then we’ve got to look at what do we actually need to do. We need more places to send criminals, so we are building more prison capacity for adult and youth offenders alike.

“You need to have a clear instruction to the judges to actually send them there. So we will be reforming the Sentencing Act to make clear that people should be getting tougher sentences, and we’re stopping the public funding of cultural reports and section 27 reports, which are, frankly, sob stories for convicted criminals after they’re convicted, with $5,000 of taxpayer money to explain why it’s not really their fault and why they shouldn’t get a larger sentence. That stops too.

“And then we’re amping up the number of police. So yes, we are removing people from the Ministry of Justice. Just like most of the public service became bloated under labour, but we are changing the rules to get the right values in place, and then putting the resource where it will make the most difference to people on a day to day basis.”