Shane Te Pou: Public servants deserve thanks for their mahi

An Air Force Rescue in progress. Shane Te Pou says all these helpers need thanks. Photo / NZDF

OPINION

When did “public service” become a bad thing?

Teachers, nurses, police officers, and a hundred other roles - one in five of us work in the public sector (a proportion, by the way, that hasn’t grown under Labour), yet public service is routinely jeered by some in politics and the media. People doing those essential jobs are dismissed as “bureaucrats” by those who want to cut public services to pay for tax cuts.

But it is these so-called “bureaucrats” who have been doing 12-hour shifts in the emergency “bunker” underneath the Beehive co-ordinating the responses to the Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle.

The Air Force pilots flying the helicopters with food and water to cut off communities, they’re public servants.

So are the council workers reconnecting water systems to homes and businesses.

Just last week, a senior manager from Auckland Council visited our whare at 7pm on a Friday night. With torch in hand he opened up the stormwater drain and unblocked it. A s***ty job, literally.

So are the MSD workers getting emergency payments to families who have lost everything, the communications staffer sending out the emergency alerts, and the local councillors and MPs working endless hours at the evacuation centres (big shout out here to Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni, doing her day job while working to all hours of the night helping those who lost their homes in the floods – no fanfare, just mahi).

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni at the Emergency Civil Defence Centre at Trusts Stadium in Henderson as Cyclone Gabrielle forced widespread evacuations. Photo / Dean Purcell

People just getting on and doing the mahi, like my old school mate Veronica, whose day job is an administrator for MSD . In times of crisis she packs her bags and spends days away from home on the ground, working for those that live in disaster zones. No overtime, no bonus, just the satisfaction of helping her fellow citizens.

All these public servants are helping tens of thousands of Kiwis pick up the shattered pieces of their lives. They’re doing it alongside the iwi and hapu who are housing people in their marae, the individuals like the “three Māori boys” who saved a dozen lives in Esk Valley, the community groups like David Letele’s Buttabean Motivation and Pasifika churches getting aid to families.

Public servants will be the ones leading the rebuild of the bridges, roads, and other infrastructure washed away. They’ll be the ones working out how to build back smarter and with more resilience to climate change, and how to address issues like forestry slash that make these storms worse.

It is easy to see the value of public servants during a national crisis, when they’re out there saving lives on our television screens. What we don’t see on the TV are the thousands of individual crises every day that public servants work to alleviate: the doctor helping the sick kaumātua, our teachers working with rangatahi to get qualifications, the Kāinga Ora worker getting a whānau into a state house, or the labour inspector helping the kaimahi who’s been ripped off.

And for every so-called “frontline” worker, there are people doing the IT, the payroll, the office management and all those vital roles that keep the machine going. They’re all serving the public, and they deserve better than to be labelled as “bureaucrats”.

Recently, David Seymour said, “We need a government that does less so New Zealanders can do more.” Truth is, we need a government that does more so we can do more. The crisis response shows how vital public servants and the work they do is to enabling the rest of us to live our lives. They create the physical infrastructure, the legal and economic frameworks we need to function as a 21st century society, and the public services we all use every day, whether we realise it or not.

Do you notice when National talks about sacking 14,000 public servants, they never say which ones?

It’s easy, cheap politics to demonise the “bureaucrat” and call them a waste of money. It’s a bit harder to acknowledge the reality of the public servant working long hours for all of us and name the actual people who would get the sack.

As the Public Service Association’s Kerry Davies told me, “There really is no waste of the sort National alludes to. The OECD has said New Zealand has one of the most trusted and efficient public services in the world. It’s about the same size as it was in 2017 in proportion to our overall workforce, and comparable in size to those in the UK and Australia.

“Communities, particularly those doing it tough right now in the face of the cyclone devastation, deserve to know the real choice ahead of them this election. This Government has backed a strong public service, what is National’s plan? New Zealanders have a right to know.”

In this age of permacrisis, we need our public servants more and more. Rather than use them to score political points, let’s thank them for the work they do for us all.

As chairman of the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council Rick Barker put it to me: “They are smart, capable people who are motivated by service to their community by choice. I have had the privilege of interacting and working with public servants in a number of different jurisdictions, and none have a better public service than ours.”

We’re going to need more mahi than ever from our public servants during this rebuild and in the future as the fight against climate change becomes more and more onerous. Time to stop putting the boot in and back them.

To our public servants, I say thank you and kia kaha .

Shane Te Pou (Ngāi Tūhoe) is a commentator, blogger and former Labour party activist.