Ann Fletcher

During a recent visit to Whakatāne Hospital, an attending doctor made a quip about “this dammed Government”.

It would have passed me by ordinarily; however, my mind was flung back to an opinion piece I had written in October 2021. I thought, “this doctor was seriously mis-informed”.

The Ministry of Health and District Health Boards (DHB) were set up by Labour’s Helen Clark (2001-2008 governance) to bring a community focus to health care, decentralising the health department to establish 20 DHBs.

John Key’s governance (2008-2017) fine-tuned the policy with improved elective surgery, shorter waits for cancer treatment, increased immunisation and better cardio services.

When Jacinda Ardern’s government came to power in 2017, health targets were abandoned.

A report by Heather Simpson in early 2020 advised that DHBs were not on track to deliver the annual elective surgeries, there were 10,000 fewer than the previous year.

In hindsight, it appears that health was being set up to fail.

In March 2020, Covid hit and in 2021 Delta made its appearance.  

A directive to “clear the decks” went out to DHBs to accommodate both Covid and Delta cases, that in fact did not materialise.

Not long after, the embattled Minister of Health David Clark resigned, citing he had become a “distraction” (July 1, 2020 – he had broken his own Covid laws).

Andrew Little became the new Minister of Health, and by 2021, the ministry reported an estimate of 81,500 surgeries were backlogged.

As we were all very much aware, our health system was a chaotic mess, meeting only one third of the benchmarks being achieved by 22 OECD countries on a per capita basis.  

At this point, there was a shortfall of 901 registered nurses and 100 ICI nurses and doctors; while immigration reported there were 235 doctors waiting for residency and some were leaving because of immigration processing holdups.

New Zealanders were a well and truly floundering mass. They just wanted to return to some notion of normality.  

Covid was an easy target, and was used to take our mind off what was really happening to our beloved wee country, as citizens we were basically re-centering our survival; financially and spiritually.

In the shadows, working away with great stealth, Ms Ardern and her counterparts had a document secreted away called He Puapua.

In 2021, she announced that the New Zealand health system was going to be restructured amid calls of why? How, financially?  

Her agenda was to use the health system to set in place the first steps of He Puapua, a refocus on Māori self-determination or rangatiratanga.  

This full report was completed in 2019 and hidden from public view until May 2021, when it was leaked to the opposition.  

National and Act released it to the public and widespread consternation ensued; New Zealanders didn’t want a country divided by co-governance, two systems; they wanted the unity of one people respecting cultural difference.  

This, they thought, had been proved with Treaty settlements feeding a fast-growing Māori economy of over $75 billion.  

The new, New Zealand health system, Ms Ardern announced, would be a triangular affair, with the Ministry of Health at the top and sitting at the base in equal co-governance were the new Māori Health Authority, with the introduction of local Māori Hauora Clinics and Health New Zealand, which would disestablish local DHBs and centralise their old DHB structures. (I believe that, had the DHB not been disbanded, Whakatāne’s maternity ward would have stayed open, supported by local knowledge)

Most of us didn’t have any idea of what was happening, except successive budgets showed a lot of the health cash was going into commissioning this new outfit.  

Ms Ardern and co were setting up two heavy weighted systems under the umbrella of the Ministry of Health with Iwi-Māori Partnership Boards, 16 governance leaders, Hauora Māori Advisory Committee, bureaucrats and advisers.

The cost of this, along with the money being printed by The Reserve Bank and the finance minister’s excessive spending habits, were out of control and Ms Ardern put her “kindness scarf on, tied it with self-compassion, and high-tailed it out of New Zealand.”

New Zealanders with a smattering of knowledge were not surprised to see inflation at 7.5 percent when the new Coalition Government took over. Our debt loading had increased from $50 billion to $175 billion.  

The Labour government was deeply out of its depth and appeared not to understand that debt isn’t free.  

New Zealand’s interest-on-debt forecast for this year alone is $9.5 billion.  

To put it in perspective, that is the same amount of money needed to fund the entire Police, Ministry of Justice, Customs Service, Corrections and the defence forces combined.  

Chris Hipkins told Q+A on September 8, 2024 that “I think we absolutely need to increase our debt”.  

Anyone who runs a household budget understands that debt isn’t freedom, and it appears that Labour is bent on using debt as a “strong control factor”.

The reality of this chaos hit home when our devastated community was told obliquely by Health NZ that our maternity facility was closing at short notice because staff couldn’t be attracted from overseas.

For those interested, the editorial of the NZ Medical Journal:2024, September 6 will more fully inform you of the position the Coalition Government has found themselves in.  

With the drive of the community supported by local representative Dana Kirkpatrick, it appears that a re-opening of the maternity unit is on the horizon and a couple of Labour-appointed heads have rolled from the top of Health NZ, however, the landmines hidden by Labour keep exposing themselves, often via their appointed public servants.

Bruce Cotterill recently stated (NZ Herald, June 7): “We were once a country that could do anything, Number 8 wire and all that.  

“But we are not anymore.” And so, we have become a country divided, families have become divided, parents who had worked hard all their lives, being told by offspring that Government grants of up to $1.5 million in an 18-month period for cultural artistic ventures were fully justified because “they were Māori and under the Treaty it was their right” grants that were enabled by people they knew in the bloated public service, offspring who had grasped fully the notion of opportunism.

Integrity is sometimes the last stand; as a nation we must hold its hand tightly.

This is written to the new doctors, who are unfamiliar with the political complexities of NZ Health.