Open letter to Hon Judith Collins – Green Party

It is with sadness that we write this open letter to respond to the blatantly partisan screed you wrote yesterday. We find it necessary to do so to correct the record and defend the hardworking teachers, nurses and doctors who are striking for fair pay and safe conditions for staff and the public they serve against your attempts to smear them.

But before we get to that – we would like to invite you to spend just one week walking in the shoes of our teachers, nurses and doctors. You have no right to bully or demean our hardworking public servants from your position of privilege without experiencing a fraction of what they have to put up with. You have no right to talk down to people facing the worst economic conditions in decades, as your Government hands out billions to landlords and a fraction-of-inflation pay offers. You have no right to lecture people at our frontlines, like our nurses, who are facing unsafe staff conditions that make it dangerous for the patients they care for and themselves.

The first claim in your letter that PPTA did not request to talk about pay and conditions has already been proven a lie, and you should already have known when you sent your letter that the Minister’s office explicitly requested them not to discuss pay and conditions.

Your decision to include it in your letter contradicts the second claim you made in your letter – that the Government is ‘negotiating in good faith.’ It is obvious that your letter is the spearhead of a wider Government offensive against teachers, doctors and nurses. This Government clearly intends to cynically abuse the machinery of Government to conduct a propaganda campaign against them – and has already begun to do so by paying for the promotion of social media ads against the workers. Your egregious misrepresentation of teachers’ remuneration in August this year is another clear example of this silly, sad smear campaign.

The third claim you have made is that the government values teachers, nurses, doctors and all public sector employees, a claim you undermine a few sentences later when you assert that ‘the country is simply not earning enough to meet all these calls.’ The Government didn’t hesitate for a moment to give billions of dollars of tax cuts to landlords and hundreds of millions to big tobacco and fossil fuel industries. You, as Minister for Public Services, also didn’t hesitate to blow up the fees of board directors by up to 80% – despite being warned that doing so without commensurate increases in funding would risk taking resources away from the frontline workers who are striking now.

There is still an opportunity for you to do the right thing by the public who need safe working conditions that workers are striking for this week. Stop the clownish, desperate stunts and show some real leadership. Settle the strikes by paying our doctors, nurses, teachers and public servants what they’re worth and invest in our public services to ensure safe working conditions.