New Zealand: How Big Should It Be?

It depends how you measure it, in land area New Zealand is about the same size as Japan or the British Isles, or if you're American, the same size as the state of Colorado.

Another way of looking at it is to measure the economy. NZ's total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is about $185 billion (US Dollars).

Compare that with the largest companies; Walmart has a total revenue of about $482 billion, Volkswagen $237 billion and Berkshire Hathaway $211 billion.

How about comparing staff numbers? Walmart employs 2.3 million worldwide, Volkswagen 610,000, Berkshire Hathaway 331,000; while little old New Zealand has 4.5 million people producing that GDP, in total less than the any of the three companies mentioned.

What about management? New Zealand has approximately 45,000 public servants and another 28,000 local authority employees.  If you accept that these people are roughly equivalent to managers at some level in the corporate world, then NZ has 73,000 of them.

Walmart has fewer than that number of managers for a revenue almost three times the size of NZ's GDP. My guess is Volkswagen will have fewer managers than Walmart and Berkshire Hathaway much fewer still. At the top in Berkshire Hathaway sits an executive team that is very small operating out of the Kiewit Plaza in Omaha, Nebraska.

Am I making my point? NZ is grossly and excessively governed. NZ does not need all these people. The state of Colorado employs about 32,000 at the state level off a population of 5.3 million and a GDP 40% larger than NZ's. I'm not sure what the total head count is if you combine federal, state and local authorities; someone may like to provide the numbers.

California has 204,000 full-time employees and that state on its own would be the world's fifth largest economy with a GDP of $2.4 Trillion; it has 4.5 times the number of government employees but is more than twelve times bigger economically (and much bigger territorially as well).

This is one area where National has failed miserably, they promised to reduce the head count at government level. Where is this going to end, when everyone is working for the government?