Claire Trevett: Willis and Seymour tackle the evils of staying at home

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THREE KEY FACTS
Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor. She started at the NZ Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
OPINION

Every now and then, the coalition Government likes to have a spurt
of tough love measures to try to eradicate a perceived sin among the population.

This week’s big crackdown was on the evils of staying at home.
Public Service Minister Nicola Willis kicked off proceedings with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on Monday afternoon, when the big announcement in the final week of the Government’s action plan was a Work From Work edict to public servants.
Willis had decided the post-Covid working from home rot had lingered too long and had to be wrestled under control. Henceforth, only those with good reasons should work from home and policies to govern it had to be developed. It was not an “entitlement”.
The office philodendrons were wilting and dusty, the staff who were going into the office were getting lonely and the businesses of Wellington were folding in numbers.
It was a brave move from the minister who has also overseen staff and funding cuts across the public service, and who has warned those left not to expect big pay rises any time soon. However, Willis pointed out, rightly, that private sector companies were also bringing in working-from-home rules.
They had cited the same things that were concerning Willis: better ideas came from chats at work, juniors were mentored if both they and their seniors were at work.
Willis did not quite know the extent to which the rot was lingering because, unsurprisingly, many government departments did not do roll-calls every day.
Keen for important data, she tasked the ever-shrinking government departments with reporting on their use of work-from-home agreements so she could keep an eye on things.
The public servants were unimpressed, seeing it as petty. Wellington businesses were pleased. A fair few workers who did not work from home were also a bit unimpressed, if only because the flow of public servants into the CBD meant more traffic jams.
Then came Act leader David Seymour who continued with his mission to stop students staying at home.
It was the second phase of his crackdown on truancy, and he did have some data to prove the first phase was working (maybe).
The school attendance figures for term 2 in 2024 had 53.2% attending at least 90% of the time – up from 47.1% in 2023.
It wasn’t enough for a ticker-tape parade given the target he has set for himself is 80% attendance – but he has another seven years to hit that target.
So Seymour carried on, this time setting out something with the snappy name of Star (Stepped Attendance Response), setting out what the consequences of truancy should be.
His order for schools to set a plan with increasingly muscly interventions after a kid missed five, 10 or 15 days is aimed at showing the focus is not all bark and no bite: including directing the Minister of Education to prosecute more parents of chronic truants. And he’s kept his threat of introducing fines for parents up his sleeve if things do not improve.
His crackdown meant that soon after wrestling with the meaning of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, Seymour was wrestling with more conundrums: what were the principles of truancy?
The question he faced was whether a student who went to a climate change protest instead of school was wagging. Just as with the Treaty principles, Seymour had the answer already. Yes, it was.
So he issued his ruling for schools to log student absences for the climate change protests on Friday as explained but unjustified absences.
He got backing in that from the top: PM Christopher Luxon, who pointed out that there were two other days of the week – Saturdays and Sundays – when the children could voice their concerns about the climate to their heart’s content.
The second conundrum was the issue of teacher-ordered truancy.
Were students who did not go to school on a teacher-only day truants?
He clearly decided that too was arguable, even if the kids had been told to stay at home because it was teacher-only day.
To guard against it, he banned teacher-only days on school days.
From now on, teachers should only gather without their charges during school holidays.
To be fair to Seymour, that is what the rules already say, unless the school gets permission from the Ministry of Education. It just seemed that the rules were being ignored and Seymour wanted that to stop or at least monitored more vigilantly.
The teachers did not like that and nor did the students, for whom teacher-only days were akin to a bonus public holiday.
But Seymour assessed that the parents would like it very much, especially those who could no longer work from home to look after their kids on teacher-only days.
It meant they wouldn’t have to rustle up child-care arrangements for occasional teacher-only days.
He pointed out there was plenty of time in school holidays for teacher-only days.
As for the teachers claiming they worked hard in term-time and needed the breaks in school holidays, Seymour knew full well that argument would fall flat with workers who work all through the year with only the statutory four weeks of holidays.
By the end of the week, Seymour had charged the Minister of Education with policing whether schools sneak teacher-only days into term time, and Willis has charged all government departments with record-keeping systems and reporting on the use of working from home agreements.
As a result of this week of home versus work or school rulings, the parties that campaigned against red tape and paperwork have ended up creating quite a lot of it to try to solve the problems that afflict them.
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