Peter Williams: Why the Big Strike is a bad idea

Where will public sympathy fall?

When doctors, teachers and nurses walk off the job together it can make international headlines — but that doesn’t mean it’s wise, principled or remotely strategic.

Thursday’s public service strike may thrill some union executives and excite X’s permanent catastrophists, but in cold political reality it is self-defeating, reckless and potentially damaging to the very causes these professions claim to represent.

Start by recognising the moment. New Zealand in late 2025 is not France. We are not sitting atop a decade of austerity budgets or slashing core social services.

Government expenditure as a share of GDP remains historically high, debt is materially elevated, and inflation is far from dead. Interest rates are still holding mortgages and business borrowing in a tightening grip.

In short: this is exactly the sort of economy where union militancy plays directly into the hands of a government seeking fiscal restraint.

Even the left leaning Listener admitted in a recent cover story that the current health budget is the largest in New Zealand’s history. In 2025/26 the projected spend will be $32.7 billion or 17.8% of all government expenditure.

Early childhood and school education this financial year is expected to cost us twenty billion or around 11 percent of the government budget, with another three billion for tertiary education on top of that.

So it’s not as if we’re cheapskates when it comes to the allocation of money for the two most important social services. The efficiency of the spend and the quality of the services is another matter, although outside the orbit of this essay.

Most New Zealanders fundamentally trust nurses, doctors and teachers. They see them as the country’s problem-solvers, not the problem-makers. That moral authority is priceless — and Thursday’s strike risks squandering it.

The core dilemma is public optics. The average voter with a 7% mortgage and a grocery bill up 30% since COVID is simply not going to stomach hearing that one of the most job-secure, pension-privileged and socially respected sectors is behaving like wharfies in the 1960s, a sector where the majority of the strikers earn, or are due to earn, six figure salaries to boot.

Doctors and nurses refusing routine care or delaying elective procedures do not look noble. They look privileged. Teachers shutting schools — leaving shift workers scrambling for childcare — do not look principled. They look entitled. Even if, factually, these professionals have wage erosion arguments that make economic sense, optics beat spreadsheets every time in politics.

Worse still: this is a pure strike for sympathy. Nobody has slashed pay. Nobody has privatised health or scrapped state schooling. There is no existential crisis forcing immediate industrial escalation. In fact, the government is in formal multi-year pay negotiation windows and has openly said compensations are rising — just not at the rate union leaders want. That is not Muldoon versus the freezing workers. That is business as usual.

By taking coordinated, multi-sectoral strike action now, unions are not forcing the government to the table — it is already at the table. They are forcing the public to pick a side. That is unbelievably high-risk politics when the public mood is about economic survival, not ideological solidarity.

There is also the inflation argument — one the unions pretend does not exist. Every material above-inflation settlement in a state-funded workforce pours additional fuel into baseline government spending. That is funded by one of three things: more tax, more borrowing or cuts elsewhere. Unions refuse to say which they prefer. But the public is not stupid. Every Kiwi watching a supermarket checkout knows that inflation takes no moral prisoners. If you feed it — even for an apparently noble cause — it turns on everybody.

The strike also fundamentally breaches the implicit bargain the professions have with the public. Doctors, nurses, teachers are not just employees — they are custodians. They are trusted with the health, education and safety of New Zealanders. Their ethical power exists because the public believes they would never wield that power as a weapon. When you turn the hospital, the classroom or the clinic into a negotiating chip, you risk collapsing that covenant. And once trust goes — truly goes — it never fully returns.

Make no mistake: there are political losers here, but there is only one political winner. It is the government.

The government gets to say: We are responsibly managing inflation. We are facing down special-interest union militancy. We are defending the public against disruption. In fact, if Thursday becomes even moderately chaotic — cancelled surgeries, panicking parents, media shots of picket lines outside children’s wards — National, ACT and New Zealand First will get a polling windfall. The unions could unintentionally lock in a centre-right government for another decade.

There is a path to winning public support. It’s called moral asymmetry. Doctors fixing people despite low pay. Nurses working shifts through exhaustion. Teachers showing up every day for difficult kids despite everything and taking those parent-detested “teacher-only” days during the school holidays. That builds persuasion. Strikes blow it up.

Thursday is not just a tactical misstep. It is a strategic blunder. It puts public sympathy at risk, inflames inflationary nerves, hands narrative control to the government, and alienates the financially stressed middle who decide elections. It makes health and education workers look like an elite lobby, not the backbone of the nation.

And that — quite simply — is why this strike is a very bad idea.

Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack - where this article was sourced.