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The original was posted on /r/newzealand by /u/wellyguy2020 on 2024-10-14 04:03:20+00:00.

I work at MBIE and although it’s not my team, my colleagues just found out today that the Small Business Services unit is to be axed, and most jobs will be disestablished. My colleagues are gutted, to say the least.

Me, I just don’t get it. 97% of New Zealand businesses are small business. And the reason our deficit is growing is because our income is being outstripped by our expenses. One of the groups within SBS is Digital Boost which has trained over 55,000 small businesses on how to get online / improve their online presence and how to digitally market themselves. Their next cab off the rank was going to be helping SMEs harness the power of AI to become more productive as business adoption of AI in NZ is lagging behind many other OECD countries. So that’s now gone … The business.govt.nz newsletter is also in jeopardy and that was a good disseminator of important business information.

Surely such investment in NZ’s small business growth is important to help boost New Zealand’s income to offset our increasing expenditure? It shouldn’t all just be cuts to balance the books.

Also, didn’t this coalition promise that only back-office jobs were going to be axed? I wouldn’t class many of the upset and shocked people today as having back-office roles.

Edit: OK I probably shouldn’t have mentioned AI, it was just one of the many topics the DB team were going to provide training on (I thought it was cool, but I guess AI is still very divisive) … The gist of what I wanted to say is that for a government that claims to be so pro-business, not supporting the backbone of our economy (small business) with the types of initiatives that arguably help them grow seems very wrong to me.