Time for the government to pay up

Primary teachers are on strike this week, secondary teachers are planning the same, and next year there's the prospect of a joint teachers' strike meaning schools everywhere will shut. Meanwhile, other strike action is shutting down the courts, forcing trials to be delayed and clogging an already overstretched justice system. The underlying cause of this? Nine years of National penny-pinching and trying to "do more with less" has left public servants overworked and underpaid, and now they're sick of it enough to actually do something about it.

The government's response has been to claim there is no more money. Bullshit. Whether there's money for public servants or planes is simply a matter of priorities. And this government's priorities are to spend $2.3 billion on war-toys for America rather than making sure basic government services like schools and the courts function. More generally, they get to decide their financial parameters, such as how fast they pay down National's debt, or even whether to raise taxes to gain additional revenue to boost public services. The fact that they're not considering any of this tells us that providing basic services is simply not their priority. What is their priority? Fuck knows - but its looking like as little as possible while collecting their fat salaries. Just like National, really.

But the New Zealand public does care about those services. We care about whether kids can go to school, and we care about whether the courts function. So unless the government wants us to start caring about them, at the ballot box, it needs to change its priorities and pay up.