Dialogue: One good man, and a host of hypocrites

By GARTH GEORGE

You will be thrilled to see that another position of considerable political influence has been reclaimed by a male and has thus been returned to the natural gender of leadership.

John Banks, too, is a real man who knows and reveres God, and I wish him every success in his new venture as mayor of our biggest and most complex city. It will be a huge task to make some order out of the chaos that Auckland has become under several dithering administrations, but he certainly has all the credentials.

It will be interesting to see, though, whether city bureaucrats - those masters of obfuscation - can write a meaningful memo in a page or less, and whether councillors are able to order their thoughts quickly enough to make a useful contribution to a meeting that lasts no longer than an hour.

In the meantime, I have every sympathy with secondary schoolteachers, and support them wholeheartedly in their industrial action to try to get better pay and conditions. And if our nurses decide to go on strike for the same reason, then they, too, will have my unconditional support.

For far too long these public servants - and others - have been grossly underpaid and their conditions, rather than improving, have become seriously worse.

And this under a Government that couldn't get into the Beehive fast enough to toss out the nefarious Employment Contracts Act and replace it with more worker-friendly legislation based on what it trumpeted as "good faith bargaining".

Where is the good faith when ministers of the Crown - in this case Education Minister Trevor Mallard - simply take no notice of the arguments of their employees and insist there isn't any money with which to pay reasonable salaries to mostly dedicated professionals?

That is a downright lie. There is plenty of money to pay teachers, nurses, prison officers, social workers and any number of other hard-working public servants, but it has been squandered elsewhere.

As a taxpayer, I would far rather my money went to these people than, for instance, to subsidies for "the arts" and to Maori television, neither of which has anywhere near the importance of full staffing, job satisfaction and efficiency in education, health and other key social services.

It's the money prodigally thrown at the arts that really gets up my nose. If anyone chooses to become an artist - be it author, painter, musician, sculptor, potter or whatever - they ought to pay their own way and not depend on state handouts.

This is, after all, the age of user-pays, so if the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, for instance, can't pay its way, it should be made to do what private business has to do - downsize, cost-cut and, if necessary, be put into receivership or under statutory management.

And as for Maori television ... considering all the millions upon millions handed out since the Treaty of Waitangi took over from the Bible as our document of guiding principles, surely Maori could pay for their own TV station.

But politicians and our money are easily parted, particularly when they are always dead set on currying favour with a section of the population whom they see as holding the key to their re-election to the Treasury benches.

Meanwhile, we suffer a desperate shortage of schoolteachers and nurses, and those who stick with those professions are disillusioned and resentful because they're working far too long and hard each day and getting no thanks for it.

So standards of education and hospital care are slipping alarmingly and the victims are among the most vulnerable and needful members of society - our children and the sick.

I know standards have slipped. Some of my most time-consuming work is in correcting the spelling, grammar and punctuation in material written by schoolteachers. Not that I blame them, for they, too, have been the victims of education standards that have been declining for decades.

It seems to me to be the height of hypocrisy for a Government to rave on about the essentiality of a knowledge economy and then to starve the education system of its most important asset - its teachers.

It's all very well to talk about job satisfaction and professional pride and responsibility to children, but the fact is - and always has been - that most of us work first and foremost for money. After all, work is merely the means of obtaining the wherewithal to do other things.

So instead of bitching because young Johnny or Jenny is missing out on some study just before exam time, parents should be screaming blue murder at their MPs and the Government to pay their children's teachers what they're worth.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz