The health budget and what can be afforded
The government is pouring about $30 billion into health each year, but for a person needing care from the system, it is found wanting.
Starting at a GP level of care, quite a number of practices can no longer take new patients. Rural GP practices are struggling to survive.
For those requiring emergency department care, the waiting times to be seen are in the hours. Call an ambulance to see if you can bypass the ED waiting rooms, but this is no longer the case in many hospitals. After-hours doctors are stretched and some no longer operate.
To be referred to a specialist by your GP can take months to get an appointment, if at all. Private hospitals have in many cases the same surgeons that operate in public hospitals. If you have health insurance you will be able to access the private hospital system, or have an accident under ACC that requires surgery.
It could well be that there is gross underfunding for the people required to run our health system, such as doctors and nurses.
Elective surgery is on the back-burner, but with elective surgery there is always pain and suffering. Drugs that are not funded for people that need the specialised ones, as the argument is that they are too expensive.
Rural hospitals that are described as band aid stations as little expertise is to be found in them. To travel a long way for those women about to give birth. To get a scan requires a visit to a main centre and some, such as a PET scan in limited cities only.
It appears that a publicly funded health system cannot live on $30b, so the situation can only get worse, unless there is more money put in and enough efficiencies are found to give the people missing out on the care they deserve.
Letters are great
Dear Mr Sullivan, I refer to your article of April 1, 2025. Whilst realising it was published on April Fool’s Day, I submit the following reasons for retaining our postal services:
1. Hand-writing reinforces the brain-body connection;
2. Hand-written letters, cards and notes are a simple pleasure for sender and receiver;
3. Hand-writing is part of our being able to retain information, and the way in which it has been collated or presented contributes to our understanding of that information: typing has a disconnecting effect;
4. Continuing to use our biological functions enables those functions to exist, and establishes a sense of self;
5. Many of us very much enjoy the act of writing;
6. And may the cost of postage, especially at Christmas, be affordable.
For shame
Shame on the ODT for publishing Stan Randle's letter of disinformation and untruths (2.4.25). Open debate is vital in any democratic community, but such debate must be curated within the confines of factual accuracy.
Mr Randle claims there is no mandate for the inclusion of karakia at council or university. May I suggest one might find that mandate within Te Tiriti ō Waitangi? Mr Randle suggests Dunedin was a city built on a foundation of Scottish Presbyterian monoculture alone, erasing not only the hundreds of years of Māori history, but also the contributions of many cultures in this city's development, such as the Chinese.
These are not areas of debate, but attempts to undermine factual accuracy, and Mr Randle engages in cultural erasure. Just because someone writes to the editor, that doesn't mean it should be published.
Wake up and walk down the varied garden path
Winston Peters has declared war on woke. He has "made clear his intention to continue a culture-wars crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion." I’m wondering what his garden will look like when he’s finished.
The garden at our place is bursting with diversity, equity and inclusion. Plants of all kinds grow happily together. The roses don’t wage war on the dahlias, and the rhodos are quite comfortable to have hydrangeas and primulas nestling around them. Their root systems intermingle. The more brightly coloured ones attract the bees which pollinate all the flowers indiscriminately.
Difference is what makes a garden beautiful. How does that children’s hymn go? "All things bright and beautiful . . . the Lord God made them all."
If you prefer it, Mother Nature made them all. And Mother Nature knows that diversity is essential for survival. Evolution is about the power of difference to create renewal.
Planet Earth is bursting with life, in all its diversity, equity and inclusion. Declare war on that and what do you end up with? Planet Mars. If Winston would prefer to live there, I’ll speed him on his way. As for me, I’m with Mother Nature.
If asking a silly question, get a silly answer
It surprises me that only 63% of the people polled in the RNZ-Reid Research poll said they thought it is parents’ responsibility to provide lunch for their children when they are at school.
Of course it is parents’ responsibility, here in New Zealand: if you ask a foolish question in a survey or referendum, then you get a meaningless answer. But if the answer is taken seriously and gets publicity it seems to become the truth on which many opinions are then based, even though the answer was to a meaningless question.
Instead, the question should have been something like this: "If some children regularly come to school without lunch, whose responsibility is it to see that are adequately fed"? Then the result is more likely to have meaning, and be one on which good discussion can be based and valid opinions expressed.
That is the situation we are facing at the moment. That many children are coming to school without lunch is reality. It hasn’t always been. And that is the reality many older adults remember, when they talk about Marmite sandwiches and an apple in a brown paper bag.
The causes of poverty are many, and they are often complicated; most of them are out of control of the people who find themselves in that situation. Those of us who are not troubled by poverty usually fail to understand the complex set of reasons that lies behind it, and the many combinations of factors that result in family poverty.
To blame people for being in that situation is entirely simplistic. A few will be, but not the majority. How many people expect that their working life, or a large or even small part of it, will be spent being unemployed?
But when government policies knowingly cause unemployment, and increase unemployment, then surely it becomes the government’s responsibility to feed the children who become hungry as a result. Whoever’s fault it is, it is certainly not the children.
Address Letters to the Editor to: Otago Daily Times, PO Box 517, 52-56 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin. Email: editor@odt.co.nz
