Keep calm, I thought. It was the beginning of King’s Birthday Weekend, and an eftpos machine in Ostend had just eaten my only eftpos card.
The person behind me said, “It’s done that to me before”.
The elderly lady ahead of me had wandered off with a distracted air. She came back to tell me that her card had been taken too.
The three of us gathered helplessly around the machine. “Look, it’s doing something,” I said. There was a whirring sound, as if – hope against hope – my card was on its way out.
And then… nothing.
It’s okay, I said, look, there’s a number to call. “For any issues with this ATM, please call [this 0800 number] or contact your bank.”
I don’t know what I expected – a SWAT team to fly in and crack open the machine?
I called the 0800 number. “Welcome to [the bank]. To use phone banking, press 1 or stay on the line for more options. For loans and insurance, press 2. For credit cards, debit cards, card fraud, Apple Pay and Google Pay, press 3. For term deposits, press 4. For KiwiSaver, Managed Funds or Retirement Plans, press 5. For online banking and all other banking queries, press 6. If you are calling to report security concerns, suspected fraud, or you’ve been targeted by a scam, press 1. For all other enquiries, you have called us out of hours.”
I hadn’t listened carefully enough, I thought. I must have missed the bit where it tells me what to do when an eftpos machine eats elderly people’s eftpos cards. I tried option 3. I tried option 6. I pressed 1. I pressed 6 again. I began to lose my mind.
Time passed – how much time? I don’t know – as I blundered down automated dead-end after automated dead-end. The voice began, in my imagination, to sound menacing. My mind began to fray. Finally (I only know this because my partner Greg told me), I shouted “Your money machine just ate my bank!” and hung up.
The eftpos machine is in the foyer at Woolworths, and sympathetic staff promised to put an ‘Out of Order’ sign on the machine. “There’s not much we can do”, they sighed.
The company which owns the machine made $1.20 billion profit after tax in the year to September 2025. It has no bank and no tellers on Waiheke, which must save it a fortune. Eftpos machines are its Waiheke ‘shopfront’, along with one 0800 number and a social media chat bot. I ended up sending the chat bot a message with a lot of exclamation marks.
The bank’s website brags about its “platform with built-in AI to help employees have better conversations with customers and reduce contact centre wait times”.
My long journey into 0800 hell came a few days after the government promised to replace 8500 jobs in the public sector with automated decision-making systems. When the Minister of Finance Nicola Willis enthusiastically linked the adoption of AI to sweeping job cuts, AI boosters cringed. They don’t like it when you do that.
Willis is desperate to get Crown spending and debt below 30 percent of GDP, an abstract target which should be questioned far more than it is. Sacking so many public servants may cost more money than it saves – in redundancies, consultancy fees, loss of institutional knowledge, tax income and legal fees.
There is also the human cost.
Have you ever watched the British TV series Mr Bates vs The Post Office? It dramatises the Horizon Post Office scandal, which has cost British taxpayers more than NZ$2.8 billion, paid out to people whose lives have been destroyed by an automated accounting system introduced to save money. And then there’s the Australian Robodebt scandal, and the Dutch childcare benefits scandal, where automated decision-making systems accused innocent people of fraud. “When automation and AI goes wrong, they do so at scale,” warns AI expert Dr Alexandra Sinclair in a Spinoff piece headlined: Is the NZ government sleepwalking into its own automation scandal?
Unlike taxpayers in Australia, the EU or Canada, New Zealanders have no protection when the ‘digital welfare state’ goes wrong. “The lack of AI-specific regulation [here] means the public has no individual rights of challenge in the courts for AI-specific harms,” says Sinclair.
Our creaky government digital systems are ill-suited, she writes, to opaque automation systems only as good as their datasets. The government is signing us up for updates and price rises that will be hard to opt out of. In sacking so many in the public sector, money will be flushed from Kiwi workers’ pockets and the economy, to the usual suspects – the tech oligarchs.
“Efficiency,” writes Sinclair crisply, “is not the only value of government. The public do not want government making incorrect decisions about them efficiently.”
On Friday, the government vastly increased the number of welfare decisions which can be made without human oversight. The Ministry of Social Development’s automated systems will now be able to cancel many benefits if ‘clients’ do not reply fast enough.
“A computer cannot see the unique circumstances or humanity of someone in poverty,” said Green Party social development spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March. “It cannot weigh the consequences on someone’s life if assistance is declined.”
For many of us, the loss of an eftpos card would be a minor irritation. For the confused elderly lady ahead of me in the queue, it felt like catastrophe.
• Jenny Nicolls
