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- Date published:
7:31 am, December 19th, 2025 - 3 comments
Categories: health, Shane Reti, simeon brown -
Tags: Budget cuts, Health NZ, Kieran McAnulty, Masterton hospital, Wairarapa hospital
Kieran McAnulty’s revelation this week that National took an estimated $90 million awarded for the remediation of Wairarapa Masterton Hospital to fill their own budget doesn’t surprise.
But it is disappointing.
Health NZ saw a remediation lawsuit for the hospital reach Wellington High Court in July 2023, and it was ultimately successful in its bid.
But instead of using the settlement funds to fix the hospital’s defects and structural instability, National took it to fill their own budget – a budget that is premised on billions for landlords, readies billions for foreign fossil fuel companies, and hundreds of millions for multinational tobacco companies (mainly benefiting Philip Morris, Bishop’s former employer, which reportedly and successfully targeted NZ First).
Simeon Brown tried to conceal this Wairarapa hospital information for almost a year until the Ombudsman intervened.
Local MP McAnulty has been fighting for transparency for the entire time.
As McAnulty makes clear this week:
“The last estimate was that we are 40 nurses short and they are not allowed to hire.
So not only are they overworked but they are working in unsafe conditions that this government got money to fix and they took it.
They took it to fill the hole in their budget.
It is shameful, it is deceitful, and it is a genuine scandal.”
In September, Wairarapa doctors spoke up about concerns, with one surgeon, Dr French, telling local media:
“We know the Government has its metrics. But fundamentally, you can’t increase production in the factory if you don’t staff it and resource it.”
To add insult to injury, it was revealed that same month that Simeon Brown specifically excluded Wairarapa from a $100 million fund it announced to keep hospitals chugging along – funding that comes off the back of up to ~$2 billion of cuts National has forced onto our public health system since they came into power.
And more: another half a billion dollar ($500 million) cut for hospitals and public health announced on Wednesday while funnelling taxpayer wealth to corporate/private health.
Ho Ho Ho – the ‘gifts’ never stop under the National Party, mostly delivered on Friday evenings, weekends, or during the Christmas period when most have their attention elsewhere.
McAnulty’s Masterton Hospital news broke on Tuesday, and as at the time of writing, no publication has covered it.
There has however been plenty of noise about the faux battle between Taxpayers Union Chair and former Finance Minister Ruth Richardson and National’s Nicola Willis ( with the latest that Richardson has “pulled out”).
Priorities and distraction, after all.
Wairarapa, in a severe seismic hazard and flooding zone, deserves better.
So do the hardworking doctors and nurses, and Kiwi residents.
Even with the various deferrals and “re-allocations” taken from hard working Kiwis – e.g. pay equity amounting to $13 billion, cuts to disabled family entitlements, cuts to transport subsidies for elderly, “saving money” on near homeless by forcing more Kiwis into cars and streets than ever, cuts to police budgets etc., National are still tracking to significantly more debt than Labour.
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National’s multiple hospital builds deferred in office include: Dunedin Ōtepoti, Whangarei, Nelson Whakatū.
The opposition need to clearly and concisely let kiwis know over summer the plunder that's been ongoing by the sorted for their backers.
Fill the break up with the reality kiwi's can see in the health system. GP's are expressing frustration to patients, imaging is backlogged etc.
Postcode lottery is in full swing again, as an example cataracts have different criteria depending on which region you're in. One family memebers getting booked in for cataracts when another's been told forget it, you have to be able to not read the second line for this region. The other region it was can't read the 4th line then in you go.
Haters and wreckers are very much at play so it needs effective messaging in play as the msm is doing coalition bidding and the online ads have already begun as their deep funding allows.
I recently had a medical procedure to check for cancer – my second test a few years after the first which found one potential concern; the first test had been at a public hospital with a very efficient process of pushing people through quickly – the medical staff had no waits between patients. This time it was still at government cost, but held at a new facility belonging to Southern Cross – same medical specialist who also still also works at the public hospital. Efficient but no apparent haste and an orderly relaxed queue. More of this government delivering profits to its friends . . .
Looking for good and fair governance from the supposed group at the top is futile. What Labour was told would ensure a well-functioning country with almost guaranteed export markets because we had signed up for the world trade acronym has been found to be a fairy story for susceptible adults. But Red Riding-Hood has been gobbled by the sly, hungry Randian Wolf, and that's not how the story was supposed to end!
We have a bunch of actors that we have chosen from an identification parade as ok and have made the best promises. It is theatre sports when we have central government elections and whatever group of the present lot we vote in they will be likely to disappoint or even renege on their promises. Their interests and motivations lie elsewhere and they are dismantling old NZ that we built, first central and its functions, and now local government. They came for other parts, and now they have come for the parts of government and society near you. (Paraphrasing Pastor Niemoller who had to rethink all his beliefs and certainties in Nazi concentration camps over 8 years.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niemoller# Niemöller was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler[4] and a self-identified antisemite…He opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph. For his opposition to the Nazis' state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in concentration camps…from 1938 to 1945. He narrowly escaped execution. In 1947, Niemöller was denied Nazi victim status. Niemöller himself acknowledged his guilt. In 1959, he was asked about his former attitude toward Jews by Alfred Wiener, a Jewish researcher into racism and war crimes committed by the Nazi regime. In a letter to Wiener, Niemöller stated that his eight-year imprisonment by the Nazis became the turning point in his life, after which he viewed things differently. He went on tour around the world to condemn the Nazi cause and educate people about why it is important to protect human rights…
We need to think differently too. Our nation is being sold off, we are mere human resources for those with gargantuan appetites for wealth and power, all our achievements in social society as citizens and our efforts in building and trading our own businesses are gone and too our government assets.
Keep on talking it fills in the days of a dying society. Or you can start gathering small self-supporting groups who are true and loyal and support each other, and look for other groups to join up to and spread. (Similar to the Friendly Societies of the past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_society | https://nzlii.org/nz/journals/VUWLawRw/1977/4.pdf | https://teara.govt.nz/en/mens-clubs/page-5 |https://www.britannica.com/money/friendly-society |https://www.friendlysocieties.org/en/)
People who are practical and kindly, and you will have to search for people who will not change to another line. Many of the middle class are now too self-oriented, the poor are too confused, harassed, and keep their spirits up with physical activity, sports, community-organised activity, constant watch on their devilish devices which form their whole world and blot out their surroundings. No time for thinking about their position in a precarious world – their own and the known world – the rest is an abyss.