So I see the average police salary is a tick over $67,000.

Is that enough money to convince you to work all night, in the crap and the vomit and the violence and the anger and the pure emotion, to deal with the least likable sector of our society, some of whom are barely above feral animals?

To risk your physical well-being and to risk condemnation from social justice warriors observing from the comfy armchairs if, in a split second, you make an error of procedure? To know that unless you’re one of the few who get to the top then this will never be a career that can take you to retirement because of the toll it takes on your body.

Is $67,000 enough to make you take all that on?

No, I didn’t think so.

And if you were a youngster looking at the starting constables salary of $56,000, would you be thinking I’ll have some of that? When you realise that most of your squadmates are only earning 10 grand more than that after their years of stress and abuse? Or would you be looking at what the nurses have just been offered and thinking ‘that looks a doddle compared to what I’m facing’?

Police are joining the nurses and teachers in pushing for a pay rise. That’s probably why you heard yesterday that 500 officers leave the police every year. They’re leaving because it’s not worth the argy-bargy.

But the police face another hurdle compared to nurses and teachers. Legally they can’t strike. So if they don’t get what they want then we run the risk of even more cops flagging it away.

The police issue is a crisis in waiting. It’s already started. It’s a slow-motion landslide.

So here’s the thing. I think we can all agree that nurses, teachers and police are paid too little. We all want to pay them more. Because we all know in our heart of hearts that we’ve underpaid them for decades.

Labour governments, National governments, all governments scrimp on public service wages to free up money to spend on whatever idealogical crusade they believe in, whether its tax cuts or more benefits or whatever.

So, we the people, have to decide what we want to do to make sure our governments have enough money to keep and attract police, nurses and teachers to the job.

We either pay more tax, or we reassign our spending.

Now if there’s one thing I know it’s that few people actively vote to pay more taxes. Because, at the end of the day while we want police, nurses and teachers to have more money, we don’t want them to have our money.

So all you can do is look at spending.

I said so to National as they ran the public service threadbare to afford taxcuts and now I’ll say the same to the new government.

The first thing they did last December was to give a $5 billion boost to Working For Families and benefits. Despite knowing that the public service has been making pay sacrifices since the year dot and especially since the Global Financial Crisis 10 years ago.

A realist who understands how important the police, nurses and teachers are to a country might have thought to have mitigated that pay rise to the poor by putting a couple of billion aside for the public service.