Paxus axe lops Chch jobs

Press, 13 September 1988, Page 23

Paxus axe lops Chch jobs

By

NEILL BIRSS

The new owner of the Health Department’s Christchurch computer centre axed scores of jobs yesterday.

Paxus Computer Services, Ltd, of Auckland, plans to move most of the 93 jobs at the centre north. This is a knock to Christchurch claims to be an emerging software development centre. There is now a dearth of computer jobs in the city. Christchurch has been one of the two centres of Health Department computing. The other was at Auckland. But it is at Christchurch that most of the applications and more than 200 systems for the country’s health system have been developed and maintained.

The Health Department computer network links nearly all of the country’s hospitals. It is powered by IBM mainframe computers at Auckland and Christchurch. The service also has a small office in Wellington, and the software centre in Christchurch. In all, the service employed about 250 people until the last

week or two. In Christchurch yesterday, a representative of Paxus gave staff letters which contained dismissal notices, offers of permanent jobs, or temporary jobs. About 40 per cent of the staff are believed to have been offered permanent or temporary jobs. The Public Service Association hopes to establish today the number of redundancies.

Redundancy costs will fall on the taxpayer and will take a large bite of the $4.5M Paxus paid for the service.

One systems programmer said many more had been laid off than expected: so many that the maintenance of the computer service might be threatened. The service provides payroll, patient admission and discharge, and laboratory computer services. Mr Larry Hill, of Auckland, general manager of Paxus Computer Services, said the company wanted to take many of the staff

to Auckland, but they were reluctant to move from Christchurch. The Health Department service concentrated its software development in Christchurch initially because of the quality of staff in the city, the excellent university and polytechnic, and the very low staff turnover compared with the North Island, a senior executive in Wellington (who has just lost his job) said last evening. The software staff laid off have little chance of jobs in the South Island. Apart from Unisys LINC, which is a research development site, there is little work. The southern software industry is bereft of opportunity because of the loss of national companies with headquarters in Christchurch during the take-over craze of the 1970 s and early 1980 s. Business computing jobs tend to be concentrated at company headquarters. The Health Department Computer Service was

given the chance over the last year to survive in the market, but failed. Some senior executives say Government and PSA restrictions which prevented it from hiring star sales staff at high incomes, and prevented it from restructuring, stopped it at the starting line.

In a few months the centre run by Paxus in Christchurch will probably employ about 30 people giving southern support to its health network.

The top jobs in systems and applications development will have gone to Auckland. Those who move north will be higher paid. Those who stay will need to retrain in new lines of work.

Paxus is an offshoot of NZI, which was expanded when NZI bought the listed Australian computer company, IDAPS. Paxus is now listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. It is still 59% owned by NZI.