@dgatwood : Absolutely. In NZ (and other places i've lived) unions seem to go in cycles of absolute necessity (as you say, the unions are doing the "good" that the govt should have been doing in the first place, either for the environment, the safety of the workers, or the stability of the industry) to the point where, having achieved a level of worker safety, pay, rights, environmental protection etc, they have nothing left to do.
At this point, the union itself doesn't want to disband (and lose their well paid hierarchy) so they pick fights, obstruct commerce with unrealistic wage demands, conditions etc. Eventually they lose members, or get squashed, legally sidelined or outlawed by a govt who has the support of enough of the public who have suffered due to the unions (due to pickets, strikes etc), and the business owners then claw back ground, reduce conditions and pay, and the cycle starts again.
So maybe we need a system where the unions can always exist, but members can come and go more easily, so that when an issue grips the workers attention, they can vote with their feet/wallets, and if enough of them agree that (say in this current environment for example) sick leave should be more generous, they can band together and make it happen.
Ultimately, the workers know how much they can take from the golden goose before the goose dies. No (few?) workers want a business to go under, but when a union gets too powerful and singleminded about punishing mgmt, everyone is at risk of losing their jobs.

More lies from guruevi;
"managed to ban all guns" : Totally false. The ban on *some* semiautomatics hasn't reduced the gun ownership rate in NZ by even one. (this is because there are no cases where a gun owner only owned a now-illegal style of gun - ie every single owner who used to own a semi, also owns a legal style gun, hence no decrease in "gun owners")
"punch off some other far left ideals" : False, incoherent
"doesn't mean she's effective" : False. No other politician has managed to shrink the number of legal styles or classes of firearm in NZ. The one politician who might have been able to (John Banks, 1990) publicly admits he has been haunted by his failure to convince his collegues to ban semi autos. Ardern succeeded. Q.E.D
"she's a dictator." : False, there is absolutely no evidence of this, proven by not a single peep from any over-reach watchdogs.
"Blowing out budgets" : False - biggest surplus in a long time.
"minimizing the actions of certain politicians" : False claim. If you understood MMP you won't make embarrassing mistakes like this.
So if you take away guruevi's errors and false claims, the only words left are fillers.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that Kiwi's and Aussie's are any smarter than US citizens - or the rest of the world. We have our fair share of retards, we just have more people in the category who don't suffer (quite so much) from Dunning-Kruger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Hmm - Moron-ith, do you know which country New Zealand is? Do you mean Australia (with the toads)? Maybe you mean Great Britain with the foxes? But well done with the ragwort comment, NZ does have ragwort, although i think you just got lucky with this one.