Commsnishambles

Last week the Government announced a pay freeze for all public sector workers earning over $100,000. It also said that those earning between $60,000 and $100,000 would only get pay increases under "special circumstances", while those under $60,000 would see business as usual

The blowback was swift and fierce. I idly wondered if the Government had forgotten that public sector workers weren't just policy folk, but also nurses, teachers, and firefighters.

This is not to denigrate the work done by policy folk - who are brilliant and have been amazing over Covid - but rather that it is seldom popular to go after teachers and nurses.

Then a day or so later the Government did a twitter thread about how good at fiscal management they'd been. Well done Government! Glad you're managing the books so well, and as you said in your tweet you've got $5.2 billion more than you expected. Probably could afford to pay our public sector workers a bit more eh?

Pretty sure that was a scheduled tweet that nobody realised would play badly given the earlier announcement. And the earlier announcement seems to have been one that nobody in Labour expected to play badly either.

Then on Friday the Government released its new workplace relations policy and to be honest it's awesome. It puts workers - and especially unions - back into the heart of the workforce. BusinessNZ shat the bed completely about it which means it's good for the majority of people - and I say this as a small business owner.

But the thing that I don't get is how on earth did nobody look at the calendar of announcements, see that the big workplace relations announcement was happening on Friday and go "huh, maybe we shouldn't do a big announcement about us knifing the public sector this week".

Or whoever is running the social media didn't go "hey given we announced we're knifing the public sector, maybe we shouldn't do a tweet about how much more money we have than we expected."

But no, nobody did these things, and so the Government just had a massive communications mare. The public sector wages shouldn't have dominated. The workplace relations should have. And yet on TVNZ this morning - nearly a week after being announced - the Prime Minister was forced into (feebly) defending the wage freeze. Grant Robertson gave a speech this morning that was forced into (feebly) addressing the wage freeze (and calling it "guidance" and various other euphemisms).

Aside from the shit policy, the communications have been ... appalling. And given I work in comms this is the stuff I notice.

Sometimes you have to deliver a shit sandwich, and in that instance, you just bite the bullet and do the best communications you can. Other times you cock something up and end up eating a shit sandwich when that wasn't what you ordered.

But this last week...shit sandwich wasn't even on the menu. Nobody was asking for it. Subsequent Government announcements suggests nobody needs one, ad yet the Government just went and gave it to everyone unprompted.