One great hope I have as this year’s election campaign fires up is: can we please hold the Government to a little bit of account when it comes to blaming the previous government for all the things that the current Government said would happen - but haven’t?
My ruleof thumb is you get term one to blame those who came before you, all you want. Term two is when you start to enact your policy ideas, the ideas that got you to power.
If and when you get a second term those policies are implemented and are up and running - and are there to be judged for the prospect of a third term.
This, by the way, is why Labour will lose in October. This Government has a shocking default position of still blaming National for everything that they have had six years to ‘put right’.
I see it in the ferries that occasionally manage to limp across Cook Strait. This Government, we were told last week, inherited those ferries. Yes they did, but that was six years ago - plenty of time to do something about them if you foresaw a problem, which quite obviously they didn’t.
The “delivery” issue is what ultimately will undo this Government. While the spending has exploded, while the public service has ballooned, while consultants have got rich, not a lot of stuff out here in the real world has changed. In fact, as new health stats show us, they’ve got markedly worse.
While they have spent years reorganising health at an administrative level, getting a doctor or nurse has become a joke. You can ask the very valid question as to why on earth you would mess with something as big and complex as health in the middle of a Covid crisis, or indeed the ensuing cost of living crisis. But mess they did.
They spent their usual truckload of millions renaming and upending, including plenty of cultural political correctness to end up with a system where the waiting list for those who are waiting longer than they said was acceptable to wait, has blown out to 67,000.
On the day Ayesha Verrall got the new job as Health Minister, I asked her how bad it looked and what she was going to do. She told me it was bad but she would need a briefing before she could answer the rest of the question. The trouble with that answer was that until she became Health Minister she was Associate Health Minister.
It seemed odd that a person who is a, from the health field, and b, the Associate Minister, would need briefings to tell her what was going on in her own portfolio area.
The reason she had been promoted was because the genius behind all the ideological upheaval had been sacked.
Andrew Little had been shuffled off to Defence, where I assume the new Prime Minister figures he can do little damage given we don’t actually have much of a Defence Force to mess with.
So not only is the waiting list blowing out (thus indicating none of the reforms are paying any sort of dividend) we also had National health spokesman Shane Reti saying that only 71 per cent of people in the emergency department get seen within six hours. That number has dropped from 76 per cent, which has dropped from what Reti claimed was close to 95 per cent when the last government ran the system.
National Party health spokesman Dr Shane Reti.
So the health system Labour inherited seemingly worked okay until this lot came along, tipped it upside down, changed the letterhead and rearranged the offices, but forgot the patients.
Also don’t let the stupidity of the wait time pass you by. Think about it, six hours. Who waits six hours for anything?
They plant the seed of an idea in your head and hope you will fall for it.
Even if 100 per cent of people were seen within six hours, it doesn’t make the six hours right does it? Would you wait for six hours to book a flight, get to work, deal with your accountant? So why does health find six hours even close to first world?
The simple fact is, whether it be light rail, house-building or health, this Government meddles, spends money meddling, then leaves you with something that is worse. To add insult to injury they blame others for their own incompetence, and hope you’ll swallow it.
If I was in Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne, Northland or Coromandel, I would be very worried.
