The government's back-office public service job cuts are adding to Wellington's woes

This is not the first time a government has targeted public servants for job cuts, but this time Wellington is really feeling it

The thousands of government "back-office" job cuts are causing widespread pain in the capital city.

In today's episode of The Detail, we speak to three journalists and a think tank researcher, looking at the larger picture around the cuts and what effect it will have on Wellington, a city that's already bending under the weight of broken infrastructure, housing shortages and earthquake-proofing difficulties.

RNZ digital explainer editor Katie Kenny gives us the basic facts.

"The public sector refers to a broad range, literally thousands of organisations, that serve as instruments of the Crown," she says.

"It's separated into central government - the state - and the local government. Within central government you've got the public service - those core 39 departments, ministries that you would recognise. That workforce of nearly 66,000 full-time staff ... that's the workforce that was explicitly targeted by these government cuts."

Job losses were promised to be back-office - broadly those who work in administration - rather than frontline.

So far that's seen roles cut from the Ministry of Education, Primary Industries, Oranga Tamariki and the Ministry of Health to name a few.

But the cuts have crept into some government services people weren't expecting.

"What we're now seeing are cuts at Crown entities - WorkSafe and Callaghan Innovation and Crown research institute Niwa for example," Kenny says.

Tracy Watkins, the editor of The Post and the Sunday-Star-Times discusses the change over time. She was Stuff''s political editor for about a decade and worked in parliamentary press gallery for over 20 years.

"We've had a period of quite a bit of stability in the public service for about the last 10 - 15 years," she says.

"One thousand jobs in one day is staggering, it's particularly staggering in Wellington, I think, where everyone's reeling from a whole lot of bad news lately. It feels more monumental in scale. But if you go back through the 1980s and then the 1990s, the public service numbers have really ebbed and flowed."

She talks about the 80s reforms under David Lange's Labour government, which cut public service jobs from around 70,000 down to around 30,000…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details