The Public Services Association Union is Causing Public Services in NZ to Collapse, Nurses, Teachers & Police to Leave for Australia & mass unemployment in Wellington.

The working-from-home, sometimes called "remote working", debate has heated up in Wellington with the Prime Minister and Finance Minister pushing for more public sector workers to return to the office. What does Labour Economics have to say about this matter? A lot. One of the most important theories of wage determination is called "compensating differentials". It says that a worker who has harder job conditions, like one who has to be away from home a lot, maybe has the chance of being assaulted at their work-place, like a police officer, or has to work at odd hours, like nurses, at weekends, for example, should be "compensated" through higher wages. Conversely, people with easy work conditions can be recruited and retained more easily. What has this economics theory got to do with working from home in Wellington? Everything. Remote working has made a bunch of office jobs way, way easier, in terms of not having to spend time and money on commuting, being able to sleep in for longer, and generally being more comfortable during the day (i.e., being able to raid the fridge) compared to being a teacher standing up in front of a class, being a police office on the beat, or a nurse who has to be physically in a hospital.

The upshot is that now in NZ, the professions who have to turn up for work should be getting a 20% pay rise compared to what they get now, and the working-from-home-crowd a 20% pay cut, reflecting the "compensating differential" that has arisen out of the use of (Zoom style remote) technology these post-Covid years. In the private sector, markets can make these adjustments on their own. But not in the public sector where wages are not so flexible and come under powerful union influence. The total wage budget of the public sector should be kept roughly the same, but "front line workers" should be handed huge pay rises & the remote crowd big pay cuts. Yet the Public Services Association, which has concepts like "pay equity", which means everyone should be paid the same, at the center of its ideology, which is so out-of-date that even Joseph Stalin would have changed with the times were he still around, will have none of it. That's okay if you're a communist, but at the same time, lets be honest and up-front about what is the consequence of the Association's stance: an exodus of NZ nurses, teachers and police officers to Australia. Why? Because wages that should be paid to them are going to tens of thousands of "working from home" bureaucrats whose jobs are now easier (and who are saving money through less travelling) compared to before Covid when they had to get moving each day into the City. The Public Services Association has thrown those who have to go into work, the hardest working folks in NZ, being the likes of nurses, teachers and police - to the wolves to support those sipping coffee and plonking away on their laptops at home. You can't get less "equitable" than that.

Should Crown Prosecutions at the Ministry of Justice be prosecuted for wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on a doomed "murder" trial? And sued for defamation?

Since public comments on active trials run the risk of biasing juries, reporting on cases is restricted. Although this Blog was written whilst the Polkingham trial was in its first weeks, we were not able to release it then. Now restrictions no longer apply - the jury has given its verdict. So here goes. In the first days of this mega-buck trial, the Crown Prosecutor's own experts testified it was equally probable death could've occurred by suicide, or murder. Amazingly, the Herald's court reporters wrote, "two NZ pathologists who estimate they've done 14,000 post-mortem examinations .. spent the majority of yesterday in the witness box at Philip Polkingham's ongoing murder trial. But by the end of the day, jurors were left with few definitive answers other than an admittedly vague agreed-upon cause of Pauline Hanna's death: neck compression. The mechanism of the 63-year-old’s fatal neck compression might've been suicide by hanging, or she might have been strangled with hands or a ligature, Doctors Kilek Kesha & Martin Sage reckoned".

Have you ever heard of a murder trial in which the Crown Prosecutor presents evidence from their own witnesses declaring one cannot say with any certainty at all, let alone "beyond reasonable doubt", that a murder has even occurred? From that moment, the trial was over. The Prosecution proved the Defense's argument in its first days. Having established a 50-50 chance of murder or suicide, the case then descended into character assassination. The Crown launched defamatory attack after defamatory attack, describing in excruciating detail both the victim's and defendants' personal lives. It dragged both of their names through the mud. The media gulped it up - seizing on every opportunity to smear the conservative National Party types living in posh Auckland suburbs.

Why was the trial ever brought when you don't need to have studied law (like me) to know "equally probable" is not "beyond reasonable doubt"? A little statistics knowledge is enough for that distinction. Why were millions wasted on court time in a cost-of-living crisis? Why was the prosecution paid for months in court when its strategy descended into a prudish attack on a defendant's personal life? What are Auckland's Big Law Firms doing? They've come close to collapsing NZ over the Treaty, sucking money from those disputes at every chance. They've begun writing letters threatening defamation on those of us writing about monopolies. Now they've found a new activity: squandering tax-payer cash on prosecutions that should've never been brought. The only winnings in this case come from the fees of the lawyers. Its another reason why productivity growth is zero in NZ. The Crown Prosecutors should be held to account & put on the dock themselves, for wasting a nation's time and money.