Industrial Relations In NZ 2025 – back up the chimney you go, kids

If the good Lord wanted us to be healthy, educated, housed and well fed, he would have….ummmm?

Once upon a time, in the sooty glory of the Victorian age, we shoved underfed, soot-smeared boys up chimneys with nothing but a broom and the desperate hope of not getting stuck. Today, we do the same to nurses, teachers, and paramedics, only now the chimney is systemic collapse and the soot is public indifference caked thick with bureaucratic neglect.

How far we’ve come. And by come, of course, I mean fallen - in love, apparently, with austerity theatre and policies that couldn’t spot a human priority if it danced naked with a placard saying “HELP ME HELP OTHERS.”

New Zealand was once the “land without strikes,” a veritable utopia of industrial diplomacy where disputes were handled civilly and no one had to scream themselves hoarse outside Parliament in a hi-vis vest. But that dream now lies rotting in a skip behind Treasury, next to the last credible plan to fund public health.

Next week, over 100,000 public servants will walk off the job – again, including 36,000 nurses and 40,000 teachers. Why? Because, apparently, asking for basic staffing levels, pay that doesn’t insult the intelligence and conditions that don’t actively harm you is now considered too much. Who knew that expecting dignity at work in 2025 would feel as quaint as demanding fresh air in a chimney flue?

Let’s be clear - these people aren’t demanding gold-plated staplers or ergonomic beanbags. They’re fighting for the right to function. To not have to run four hospital wards with three staff and one pair of gloves. To not have to choose which child in the classroom gets attention today because “ratio” has become an abstract concept last seen in a Cabinet whiteboard session titled “How to Sound Like You Care.”

Here’s where I drop the pretence of satire and just tell you what I saw with my own tired, increasingly despairing eyes.

This week I found myself in ED at Waikato Hospital. I waited seven hours. That’s not a typo. That’s a full day’s shift if you’re a Victorian chimney boy or a modern nurse working short. While I sat there, hunched among the shoeless, the toothless, the drunk, the drugged, the lost and the lurching - all of us fellow pilgrims in the Temple of Triage - the day’s great drama unfolded not in the trauma bay, but beside an open electrical service hatch.

At least six technicians and bureaucrats stood there, slowly multiplying like a Greek chorus of the damned. Were they fixing something? No. They were deep in a bureaucratic brawl about whose job it was to report what to whom. Was it Facilities? IT? Maintenance? Comms? The argument heated. Hands were gestured. Notebooks were consulted. Rank was asserted and then, like a bad shag in a motel room, it all just sort of fizzled out. Everyone wandered off. No one fixed the damned thing. The cupboard of tangled wires and tangled responsibilities remained open, untouched, ungoverned - a perfect metaphor for the entire public sector.

That’s New Zealand in 2025. Not broken so much as endlessly deferred. We don’t fix anything. We just circulate responsibility like an internal memo, hoping the problem will retire, die, or relocate to Australia.

Meanwhile, the Government is spending. Just not on things like health, education, social cohesion or, say, the bare bones of civilisation.

No, they're hurling billions at defence, like some reverse Robin Hood with a hard-on for hardware. Because nothing says “peace, prosperity and national wellbeing” like a fleet of submersible murder canoes and tactical gear for conflicts we’ll never be able to define, let alone win.

While we funnel enough money into the military-industrial complex to resuscitate every ghost of every chimney boy ever scrubbed from the census, what does Mrs Jones get?

Bugger all for her lumbago.

She’ll wait six months for physio while her tax dollars fund helicopters that can spot insurgents we don’t have, in countries we’re not in, fighting wars we’ll never understand and all the while, her nurse - bless her exhausted soul - is skipping breaks, rationing bandages and wondering if she’ll have enough petrol to get home.

We’ve become a country where the people who teach our children, heal our sick and hold our most fragile institutions together are treated like collateral damage in a budget spreadsheet. Where Treasury bean counters frown over whether a teacher’s aide is “cost effective” while waving through billions for drone maintenance with a shrug.

It’s not just perverse - it’s policy by oblivion.

Politicians talk of “tight fiscal environments” and “efficiency dividends” as if it’s all just grown-up Monopoly. Meanwhile, real people live with the fallout. Children who don’t get diagnosed. Patients who don’t get seen. Teachers marking till midnight. Nurses crying in carparks and still the suits in Wellington whisper the same bloody line - “Let’s wait them out. They’ll get tired.”

They’re right. They are tired. But not just in body - in spirit and when people get that tired, they rise.

This “mega-strike” is not just a wage dispute. It’s a cry from the coalface, the ward, the classroom - a desperate chorus that says - we cannot do this anymore without breaking something vital, maybe everything.

But the Government keeps throwing money in all the wrong directions like a drunk trying to pay a bar tab in North Korean won.

So, the chimney boy returns - this time as a nurse with three patients crashing at once, a teacher with 32 neurodiverse kids and no aide, a midwife clocking a 16-hour shift. Bent. Sooty. Breathing in the toxic fumes of a system that won’t invest in what actually matters.

Meanwhile, the Defence Minister signs off another $3 billion for boots, bullets and boats that teach no one, feed no one, house no one and still, we wonder why things feel broken.

This isn’t a budget issue. It’s a values issue. And we’ve placed the wrong things on the pedestal for too long - shiny toys of warfare over the humble, quiet dignity of care. Public service has become sacrificial labour. We don’t push kids up chimneys anymore - we just push the people who hold society together into the fire.

Let it burn, they seem to say. Well, it is and the strike? It’s the smoke.

Author’s Note -
This satire is fuelled by fury, but also by deep admiration. To every striking worker - you are not the problem. You are the reason anything works at all. Thank you for lighting the way - even as the rest of the house burns down around you. 

A Call to Arms

If this blend of outrage, wit, and weary disbelief resonates with you, you’re not alone. We all need a laugh - especially the kind that leaves a sting.

👉 For more biting satire that isn’t afraid to call power what it is – childish and often vindictive - visit www.regenerationhq.co.nz/satire.

Because someone has to keep telling the truth - even if it’s through gritted teeth and a smirk.