Many journalists belong to the Engineering Printing and Manufactures Union, a notoriously left wing organisation led by Andrew Little, who wants to be NZ’s next Prime Minister. The reason I mention this is that there seems to be little reporting in the NZ media on the issue of what the Public Sector is costing the country, at a time when we need to be exceptionally frugal in our spending.

One would have thought that this is a subject that would attract a fair bit of public interest. Maybe the lack of reporting is down to inter-union political sympathies, I don’t know, but there is far more concern with the cost of employing government workers in the US than there is in NZ. This concern is being expressed by non government employees who in times when their own finances are being put under immense pressure, are being forced to carry the increasingly unmanageable burden of a pampered Public sector.

The New York Times even reports on the unhappiness- Across the nation, a rising irritation with public employee unions is palpable, as a wounded economy has blown gaping holes in state, city and town budgets, and revealed that some public pension funds dangle perilously close to bankruptcy. In California, New York, Michigan and New Jersey, states where public unions wield much power and the culture historically tends to be pro-labor, even longtime liberal political leaders have demanded concessions — wage freezes, benefit cuts and tougher work rules.

I don’t hear any such calls in New Zealand. The situation though must be quite similar.

[..] much of the edifice of municipal and state finance is jury-rigged and, without new revenue, perhaps unsustainable. Too many political leaders, they argue, acted too irresponsibly, failing to either raise taxes or cut spending.

Sounds very much like NZ, especially with Key and English’s rabbit in the headlights approach to the issue. Of course they can’t raise taxes. There’s no real revenue to tax, and any more looting would see what little revenue still exists evaporate too. They have to cut spending, and the first place to start is in slashing government payroll costs.

Wellington has the highest average income in the country, however its not a benefit that is earned. It occurs because Wellington forcibly extracts its income from the rest of NZ, the productive sector. It is a city insulated from market forces by a mutually self serving alliance between politicians like English and Key and the bureaucrats they work with. This alliance has to be broken. Key and English need to start slashing and burning in Wellington. Its already far too late, and the false living standards of politicians and bureaucrats are being maintained at the increasingly unmanageable expense of the rest of New Zealand.

The longer the charade goes on, the worse it will be for the productive sector and, in the end, the parasites. Even Fidel Castro gets it with a recently announced plan to immediately eliminate 500,000 government jobs and eliminate a further 500,000 by the end of 2011.

There needs to be a far greater outcry from the people who are maintaining this largely unnecessary edifice. Hard though for such things to get traction when ideologically sympathetic union members in the media, and the public service unions collude to keep it below the radar. I’ll to my own small bit by crying out right here and now- Get off our damn backs you parasites..!! Your wages and benefits are crippling the country.