More than 100,000 public sector workers walked off the job today. Teachers. Nurses. Doctors. Firefighters. Social workers. One in five public sector workers. The biggest strike in over 40 years.
I watched the footage from Queen Street in Auckland. Thousands of them marching. And you know what struck me? This didn’t have to happen.
I’m no union cheerleader. I’ve run businesses. When times are tight, you cut costs. That’s reality. And yes, there was bloat in the public sector after six years of Labour. No question.
But this government hasn’t just trimmed fat. They’ve gone straight through to the bone, and now they’re acting surprised that 100,000 people have had enough.
Since late 2023, about 10,000 public sector jobs gone. Health New Zealand – over 2,000 roles. Ministry for the Environment – a quarter of their workforce. The Productivity Commission? Just abolished it. These are people who were doing actual jobs that needed doing.
Budget 2025 dropped the operating allowance to $1.3 billion. The lowest in a decade. They cancelled 33 pay equity negotiations – saved $12.8 billion over four years. Halved KiwiSaver contributions. Cut $1 billion from emergency housing. Defence spending? Up $12 billion.
Nicola Willis says this isn’t austerity. She calls it “responsible fiscal management.” I studied economics. This is austerity. You’re cutting during a downturn, not during growth. Call it whatever you want – workers know what it means for them.
What really gets me is the justification. The government said these cuts would maintain New Zealand’s attractiveness to investors and keep the books balanced. Yeah, right. The economy has contracted in three of the last five quarters. Business investment is terrible. A record 73,400 New Zealanders left the country in the year to July—1.4% of the population. Most of them young.
You can’t cut your way to prosperity. I learned this the hard way, running businesses during lean times. Yes, control costs. But slash too deeply and you damage your productive capacity. You lose people who actually know how things work. You create a doom loop: cuts lead to worse service, which creates more problems, which require more cuts.
The public sector isn’t magic. Cut 25% of the environmental staff, and who processes resource consents? Eliminate 2,000 health roles during a staffing crisis, and who treats patients? The work doesn’t vanish—it just doesn’t get done. Or it costs more later when things fall apart.
The government calls this strike “politically motivated union theatre.” Judith Collins published an open letter saying the industrial action was unfair and unwarranted. Sure, unions have political agendas. But dismissing 100,000 workers’ concerns as theatrics? That’s not clever politics—it’s tone deaf.
These workers aren’t striking because union bosses said so. They’re striking because their colleagues are leaving for Australia. Because services are collapsing under impossible workloads. Because pay offers below inflation are pay cuts, and they know it.
Dr Sylvia Boys, an emergency doctor at Middlemore, told the Auckland crowd the government was “failing dismally” on its promises. She’s right. When your nurses, teachers, and doctors can’t afford to stay in the country, you’ve got a problem that goes beyond union politics.
New Zealand has always been pretty good at industrial relations. We’re not Australia with its militant union culture. Not the United States with its adversarial nonsense. We generally work things out.
But you can’t negotiate with someone who won’t turn up. The Post Primary Teachers Association says Education Minister Erica Stanford cancelled a meeting before they’d even submitted an agenda. When ministers dismiss concerns without genuine engagement, when they call legitimate workplace action political stunts, they’re importing a more confrontational style of politics.
This worries me. The coalition government seems to be copying international playbooks—UK austerity under Cameron, American slash-and-burn fiscal policy—rather than doing things the New Zealand way. You know, muddling through with pragmatic compromise.
The unions are demanding pay increases equal to or slightly above inflation. That’s it. That’s barely keeping pace. The fact that such modest requests have led to the biggest strike in four decades should tell you something’s gone badly wrong.
Nobody wants to say this, but the government is making a bet. They’re betting most New Zealanders will blame unions for the disruption rather than ask why 100,000 people felt they had no choice. They’re betting that talk of fiscal discipline sells better than stories of struggling public sector workers.
Maybe it works. The coalition’s support has slipped in the polls, but Labour hasn’t opened a clear lead. New Zealanders might swallow the pain if they think it’s temporary and necessary.
Or maybe we’re watching something bigger fracture. Maybe workers across sectors are waking up to the fact that the old compact—work hard, contribute to society, get looked after reasonably—is being deliberately dismantled.
The economic logic of cutting during a downturn is questionable. The political logic of alienating one in five public sector workers seems risky. But the social logic—that you can tell essential workers they’re not worth keeping pace with inflation and expect them to just take it—that’s where this government’s approach really falls apart.
The coalition will survive this. The strike will end, some compromise will happen, and everyone will move on. But something has shifted.
Public sector workers now know their government sees them as costs to minimise, not investments to value. Parents know their kids’ teachers are striking because the qualified ones are leaving for better pay overseas. Patients know hospital waiting times keep getting worse, not because of incompetence but because there simply aren’t enough people.
The question isn’t whether this government survives one strike. It’s whether they’re creating long-term damage to the institutions that make New Zealand work.
You can’t run a country like a corporate restructuring. Communities aren’t businesses. Public services aren’t product lines you discontinue when they don’t hit quarterly targets. Treat them like that and you might get short-term fiscal improvements, but you risk destroying what makes a society worth living in.
Today’s strike was the warning. Whether anyone’s actually listening—that’s another question entirely.
Steve Baron is a New Zealand-based political commentator and author. He holds a BA with a double major in Economics and Political Science from the University of Waikato and an Honours Degree in Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington. A former businessman in the advertising industry, he founded the political lobby group Better Democracy NZ. https://stevebaron.co.nz