Each figure in itself looks innocent enough, just a jumble of curves and straight lines joined together at various angles.
The final tally is largely meaningless without human analysis. At face value it could be the number of jelly beans in the jar, or pieces of woke sushi manufactured weekly, or days left until Christmas.
Or job losses in the public service this year.
The ambiguity of numbers, and the awkward fact that you don’t know what you don’t know and hence you can’t say for sure what might be missing, feeds our subjective interpretation of the outcome.
Not only that but numbers can provide a handy shield for those with a callous disregard for the reality or those being deliberately vague.
Nobody in New Zealand could fail to be aware of what has been going on in the public service this year. The government is overseeing a mammoth restructuring and a purge of public servants to save money so it can make good on its election promise of some kind of tax cut for middle-income New Zealanders.
In bureaucracy speak, ministers call it "net fewer roles". Most of us recognise that for what it is — job cuts. And in the great cull of 2024, the government is looking for thousands upon thousands of them from its ministries, departments and agencies.
This is where the number of those who are losing, or have lost, their jobs gets a bit murky. It all depends on who you believe, or at least where you get your information.
Media agencies keeping tallies of positions which are being chopped and vacancies which aren’t being filled have their totals creeping up to just on 5000. These are the result of internal cuts to meet Finance Minister Nicola Willis’s desire for either 6.5% or 7.5% savings from each department to reduce public service spending by $1.5 billion.
At Monday’s post-Cabinet media conference, Ms Willis had a different set of numbers. No surprise there. She said the government’s savings "exercise" would prune about 2250 roles from departments and take 1150 vacancies off the books. Another 500 roles would be excised through other initiatives.
That adds up to 3900 roles, quite a bit short of the 5000 touted elsewhere. Regardless, that is a huge number of people affected. Ms Willis also said she would not discount further cuts, though she did appear somewhat sympathetic on behalf of the government, saying "our hearts go out to anyone losing their job".
Sorry, but that had a hollow ring to it. How concerned really is the government razor gang for the thousands of Kiwis out of jobs, for the effects that will have on their families, the schools their children go to, their local shops and cafes, their mental health? On Wellington?
Have any of those impacts on the social fabric of New Zealand society been considered, let alone planned for?
There is little doubt that the size of the public service ballooned under the Labour government. Nobody could argue that there isn’t excess that needs trimming or that ministries could save money by sharing facilities and services, such as office space, or human resources and finance capabilities.
But where has the Public Service Commission, Ms Willis’s responsibility, been in all of this? We might reasonably have expected it to be showing more visible leadership, including ensuring departmental chief executives and their tier-two deputies were as much in the firing line for cuts as those further down the pecking order.
It would be fascinating to know how much fat has been taken off the bone at each tier in each ministry. And how many departmental heads have had their grossly inflated salaries cut to try to save jobs lower down.
Hopefully in tomorrow’s Budget New Zealanders will get more clarity on the government’s numbers game.
