Now that Mfat is getting an organisational tummy tuck, what will we finish up with?

So our foreign service will be reduced to this.

There’s lots of angst and apprehension on Wellington’s Lambton Quay after the unveiling of plans to close embassies, lay off hundreds of staff and outsource consular hotlines for distressed New Zealanders overseas.

The Herald describes this overhaul today as part of a proposed radical overhaul of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Mfat).

And a further round of job cuts is looming, on top of yesterday’s confirmation that the axe is hovering over 305 jobs, including diplomatic and policy positions.

Mfat chief executive John Allen announced proposed changes that would see 169 ministry staff culled in New Zealand and overseas, as well as 136 locally-engaged staff.

That means the loss of 21 per cent of the ministry’s 1421 staff, in one of several changes that Mr Allen said would transform the ministry into a flexible organisation with improved expertise.

Spending cuts? Let’s start by shedding the Ministry for Supporting Sheilas (and get them a bra)

Mrs Grumble wants a car - so what's on your missus's nice-to-have list?.

Alf has prepared a letter to his mate Bill English to help him in his quest to squeeze public spending.

This follows the news media’s highlighting Bill’s warning in a speech yesterday that we are in for years of austerity measures.

English said the Government’s decision to rein in new spending in this year’s Budget would mean some services that were ”nice-to-have” but not essential would be axed.

He also made clear that the Government intended to continue the tight grip on public finances after the state coffers returned to a ”meaningful surplus” in 2015/16 as it looked to repay mounting debt and resume payments into the superannuation fund.

”That means public spending restraint is no temporary aberration. It is effectively permanent,” English told the Institute of Public Administration this morning.

English also said plans were afoot to reduce the size of the public sector, including merging more agencies or departments.

Alf accordingly drafted his letter to alert Bill to the money-saving potential from scrapping the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, which (in Alf’s opinion) does not even rate as something that’s nice to have.

Outrage: if the spoils of victory are going to our opponents, we might as well make Goff our leader

Alf has been hugely comforted by the certainty that a cosy job would be found for him, should he quit parliamentary politics. His ministerial mates would stick him on the board of an SOE, a quango or one of umpteen other types of publicly funded organisation.

Their structures provide for oodles of political appointments, and they enable our ministers to dispense favours and patronage.

Alf is comforted no longer. We are giving these plums – the spoils of victory – to our bloody opponents.

The idea used to be that the jobs were dished out to long-serving, and maybe not-so-long-serving, members of the party in Government.

That was the point of winning an election. You got to run the bloody country – dig up the conservation estate, run down the public service, turn Auckland into a Super City then govern it from Wellington, think about taking travel privileges off the oldies but back off when they squawk loudly, and so on.