Not just baby with its hand out

How nurses proceed from here will determine how far they take the public with them in their fight for more pay and better conditions.

For Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, June 17 possibly cannot come soon enough. On that day and for the six weeks that follow, her primary expectations will be at the end of two short, stubby arms.

Those expectations will involve basic needs: security, sustenance and sleep. She may even get some herself while keeping one eye on what’s going on at the Beehive.

That will all be a world away from the building maelstrom of needs and wants that appears to be pushing her still-young coalition Government into an increasingly uncomfortable corner.

Ardern dramatically portrayed climate change as her generation’s ‘‘nuclear moment’’; the cost and campaign to eradicate Mycoplasma bovis is undoubtedly her Government’s biggest crisis to date. And they have gone for the nuclear option.

Eradication would be unprecedented; it is dismissed by many experts as impossible. But it may still be easier to defeat than the perfect storm of expectation breathing life and hope into the restless corridors of our hospitals, schools and beyond. In those many classrooms and wards, the ‘‘neglect’’ of the last nine years is clearly a physical, visceral force for agitation and entitlement.

Those winds of change have delivered their nuclear moment. The Government’s approach will determine the breadth and depth of the fallout for the rest of us.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s cautious Budget is looking a prudent one at this point. He left about $3 billion in the kitty for what Ardern called a ‘‘rainy day’’. This week it poured.

About $600 million of our money will be spent over the next decade to stamp out M.bovis and compensate farmers. That is likely to be just a down-payment on the wider impact to the national economy, particularly if the Government, Ministry for Primary Industries and farmers cannot prove the doubters wrong.

Nurses appear for the moment to have thumbed their noses at an 18-month pay rise of about 10 per cent, including a lump-sum $2000 payment. Some nurses even deemed it insulting. Workers in other industries no doubt would love to be so insulted. For now, strikes are still on.

How nurses proceed from here will determine how far they take the public with them in their fight for more pay and better conditions. Most people believe they deserve a significant pay rise; we believe they deserve one, and have said so previously. But the health boards appear to have called the nurses’ bluff in more than matching the findings of the independent panel.

Robertson has dipped further into the surplus for another $250m to support their better offer, which included funding for more nurses and the mechanisms to decrease workloads. Nurses now get to vote on the improved offer.

How the Government handles those expectations and the threats of strike action will cause fallout not only for teachers, sure to follow with their own pay claims, but also other public sector workers and the private sector.

It may even impact on the Government’s chances of a second term.

Such pressure certainly makes changing the odd nappy look a lot more attractive.