Health, housing a focus

Labour candidate for Waitaki Ethan Reille after his campaign meeting in Cromwell on Saturday....
Labour candidate for Waitaki Ethan Reille after his campaign meeting in Cromwell on Saturday. PHOTO: JULIE ASHER
Low turnout could not dent Labour’s youngest candidate’s enthusiasm for his role at a meeting in Cromwell on Saturday.

Both the people who attended were keen to hear Ethan Reille’s views on health and housing particularly.

A secondary level hospital in Cromwell was something he had heard a lot about from Wanaka constituents, Mr Reille said.

One of the attendees said rural nurses were not being paid the same as their city counterparts, making it difficult to retain them.

Housing shortages could be helped by "rewarding good behaviour" of holiday home owners who let out their properties but there had to be a focus on public housing, Mr Reille said.

In the past five and a-half years Labour had added 12,500 public housing units, he said.

He did not know if any of those were in Central Otago.

Upcoming changes to the Resource Management Act would also help create more property development by opening up farmland for housing. There had to be a balance between having sufficient productive farmland and housing space, he said.

Regarding health concerns, Mr Reille said the Waitaki electorate should not be so heavily reliant on a hospital such as Dunedin’s. Many excellent local medical providers were moving to the city for higher pay, so the focus needed to be on trying to keep such people.

Then the focus needed to go on to looking at the existing infrastructure such as Dunstan Hospital but a lot of people were asking if there was a possibility of building or moving Dunstan Hospital into the Cromwell town centre.

With regard to Dunedin Hospital it was important not to look at what was being lost by the cuts to plans but what was being gained from the new build, he said.

Waitaki was one of the largest electorates in the country but it was possible to cover it all if you worked strategically, Mr Reille said.

"One of the promises I am making if elected is we will have an office in Wanaka, if Parliamentary Services allows that."