There are about 63,000 public servants employed across New Zealand, with Wellington home to the highest number. Photo \/ Mark Mitchell<\/p>\n
Labour<\/a> was the most popular party among those working in the core public service with 39% support, while those in the private sector preferred National<\/a> with 38% support.<\/p>\n Twenty-nine per cent of public servants polled supported National, while 29% of private sector workers supported Labour.<\/p>\n Act<\/a> had 3% support from public service workers compared with 12% in the private sector.<\/p>\n The Green Party<\/a> received 13% support from public servants and 8% from the private sector.<\/p>\n Eight per cent of both groups supported NZ First<\/a>, while 4% of public servants supported Te P\u0101ti M\u0101ori<\/a>, half the rate of private sector workers at 2%.<\/p>\n Those in the wider public sector tend to be less left-leaning than their core public service colleagues, with equal support among the group for the left and right blocs. <\/p>\n Private sector workers who work for not-for-profit organisations also supported the left and right in equal shares, but for-profit workers supported the right bloc by a net 24%.<\/p>\n There are about 63,000 fulltime workers employed in the public service, with about 40% of them located in Wellington.<\/p>\n There are 481,500 FTEs employed in the wider public sector, including police officers, Defence personnel, teachers and nurses. <\/p>\n While agencies have their own political neutrality obligations and guidelines, the Public Service Commission states that, generally, public servants do have the right to be involved in political activity in their private lives but must be politically neutral at work.<\/p>\n Some 7600 voters responded to the poll across 2025, a larger dataset than Curia\u2019s standard monthly Taxpayers\u2019 Union poll<\/a>, which surveys about 1000 voters by phone (landline and mobile) and online with a maximum margin of error of plus or minus 3.1%.<\/p>\n Ethan Manera<\/a> is a Wellington-based journalist covering Wellington issues, local politics and business in the capital. He can be emailed at ethan.manera@nzme.co.nz<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are about 63,000 public servants employed across New Zealand, with Wellington home to the highest number. Photo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1308,45136,42,125568,130,117,43,125569,1136,3109,1517,12975,125567,418,15246,131,7563,40,38,41,39,5905,102,4478,19135,2963],"class_list":["post-205581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-compared","tag-differences","tag-headlines","tag-leftleaning","tag-more","tag-new","tag-news","tag-polling","tag-private","tag-public","tag-reveals","tag-sector","tag-servants","tag-shows","tag-stark","tag-than","tag-those","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-vote","tag-with","tag-workers","tag-working","tag-zealands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}