Dom Post on PPTA

Just saw this editorial:

Those who read newspapers and magazines during the Christmas break – most of us, surely – will have seen a series of big Post-Primary Teachers Association advertisements. They said: “Around the world, the countries that believe in investing in education understand the central importance of teachers … Attracting great teachers for our children, and keeping them in New Zealand, costs money. How can the government … not make that investment?”

The PPTA is wasting their money. Well, not entirely. If their aim is to get a better pay deal for their members, the money is wasted. If the aim is to help Labour by painting National as anti-education, then they may feel it is a good investment.

PPTA members do not believe that an administration that has supported the Rugby World Cup, South Canterbury Finance, Warner Bros and hated private schools cannot afford to give them a 4 per cent pay rise. That they have had three successive rises of 4 per cent when many parents got nothing or lost their jobs seems to have happened in a parallel universe.

I wonder if they will keep their strike action going for all of 2011.

An irony of the PPTA’s advertising campaign is that, under Helen Clark’s Electoral Finance Act, the union would have had to think twice about mounting it. Third-party advertising was heavily proscribed throughout an entire election year.

That this highly political union can now advertise its distress about pay rates to the full extent of its members’ willingness to fund it until three months before polling day – without falling foul of an anti-free speech law – is thanks only to its enemy, the Key-led Government.

Very true.