National Party leader John Key's pledge to cap the number of core civil servants at 36,000 has been attacked by his opponents as misleading political opportunism.
He expected the policy to deliver savings of up to $500 million over three years which could be used for front line public servants such as teachers and nurses, as well as tax cuts.
Mr Key said growth in government bureaucracy had massively outstripped the rest of the economy in the past eight years.
The core public service had increased by 37 per cent to 36,000 employees, compared to 10 per cent growth in state sector jobs providing services directly to the public and 22 per cent job growth in the wider economy.
A National government would not replace people when they left jobs in low priority areas and would increase resourcing in policy areas ministers were more interested in developing.
Mr Key was not ruling out redundancies or closing some agencies entirely if it was warranted, but would not name any targets.
Ministers would work with agencies in a "measured and sensible way" to sort out their priorities
His predecessor, Don Brash, said he would scrap the Women's Affairs Ministry.
But Mr Key said today it was very small and did some work that was worthwhile.
Finance Minister Michael Cullen said Mr Key was using intentionally misleading statistics to attack the bureaucracy.
The Government had massively increased the number of doctors, teachers, police and others.
There had been a smaller increase in back room staff to support their work, Dr Cullen said.
Mr Key's MPs were also making an increasing number of promises to increase government spending and hire more staff at places like the Waitangi Tribunal
"Mr Key needs to be honest about what he would actually do in government and how many staff he would need to do it," Dr Cullen said.
Mr Key said government agencies had released 250 strategy documents since 2000, many of them stating the obvious and giving little in the way of guidance or solutions.
"At a time when the outlook for the economy is grim and hardwork-ing New Zealanders are going to be tightening their belts to pay high mortgage rates and food and petrol prices, taxpayers can't afford to be paying for this kind of low-value work," he said.
"In the first term of a National government we will not grow the size of the core bureaucracy.
"Enough is enough.
"We are going to make do with the resource we have and work to get more value out of it."
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