Lester's Prescription - Positive Bleeding.
A hostile takeover of Health NZ, with the possibility of privatisation.
I live my life (woo-ooh-ooh)
With no control in my destiny
Yea-yeah, yea-yeah (woo-ooh-ooh)
I can bleed when I want to bleed
So come on, come on (woo-ooh-ooh)
You can bleed when you want to bleed
Yea-yeah, come on (woo-ooh-ooh)
Everybody bleed when they want to bleed
Come on and bleed
Governments face tough challenges. Selling unpopular decisions to the voting public to successfully complete the changes they believe in. Taking the public with them, to places they don’t necessarily want to go, they must set the scene so that things that ought to alarm the citizenry begin to make sense.
A log winded way of saying that you can’t just flog off public assets and services willy nilly without them not only failing - but being seen to have failed.
Still if you play your cards right you can have people thinking that once trusted professionals and practitioners are the problem and turning the whole shebang over to become a profit making venture is the only answer. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
On Monday the Minister of Health and the Prime Minister held a press conference to tell us that things were really bad, all of a sudden. Christ knows what they’d been doing for the previous nine months, but apparently it didn’t involved them watching the ball.
The news was, as you might expect, bad. Apparently we’re “overspending” on health by about $130m per month. Which adds up to more than a billion dollars in the time National have been in power thus far. Oops-a-daisy.
Luxon and Reti told us they were getting rid of the board and replacing them with a Commissioner, Lester Levy. Who would presumably put a stop to all of profligate expenditure on healthcare.
I couldn’t help thinking “underfunding” might be a better term than “overspending”, and that if things were so dire then maybe we weren’t making the right decisions?
On the face of it you’d have to say that if we’re spending so much more on healthcare than we’re funding, then perhaps borrowing billions for tax cuts wasn’t just fiscally irresponsible to the point of gross negligence but was a strong indicator that we’re spending our money on the wrong things.
Kind of like imaging you can just take a nice little holiday in Hawaii and worry about paying the bills you can’t afford when you get back. Nice work if you can get it - right Christopher?
But enough from our work shy PM. The Minister of Nothing, who now says he won’t even bother with the usual time slot a Prime Minister is available to reporters, on account of the fact that he prefers not to be questioned.
You can read more about Christopher Luxon doing even less here. The key points are:
Luxon will no longer appear at Parliament's "bridge run" on Tuesdays – traditionally an opportunity for the media to ask questions.
Asked about why he made the change, the PM explained that reporters still had "heaps" of other opportunities, including on Tuesdays.
However, opposition leaders have said Luxon is ducking questions about his Government.
On Monday evening Luxon took to Social Media to campaign and promote his actions. It’s so much easier when there are no pesky reporters to ask questions. He told us things were dire but he wasn’t afraid to make the hard calls. That he would be ruthless on this. I was more concerned with what was really behind the move.
Let’s take a look at what some of his colleagues had to say on the matter. It’s not like old Buzzword Bingo was going to say anything useful, even when he did turn up to face the media for a modicum of transparency.
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