Category: Health
The decision to abolish DHBs and replace them with a new centralised national bureaucracy in which decision-making will be further removed from health professionals and communities was both abrupt and drastic.
Since the election, one out of every seven people who voted for Labour have shifted their support to another party. All it takes is another one out of every seven to do the same and its game over for Labour and He Puapua.
It is now clear that the Government has staked its political future on the Pfizer vaccine strategy, which requires near universal vaccination and regular booster doses.
The apparent kindness of locking down to limit Covid-19 deaths will, instead, be killing more people by making us poorer - lockdowns are one of our greatest peacetime policy failures.
The Level 4 lockdown imposed on March 25 2020 in New Zealand was the world’s most restrictive set of closure and containment policies at the time.
I acknowledge that police surveillance and monitoring are key components in community safety and national security. But they do not result in rehabilitation. In fact, they could arguably encourage reoffending.
Prime Minister Ardern has no mandate to assume the Crown is in an equal partnership with Maori that gives tribes a 50 percent interest in our resources and the decision-making powers.
Poor outcomes are given as concrete and conclusive evidence. This is simply not the case for most Māori. Their living standards have improved enormously, as has equality of opportunity.
All councils should urgently hold a binding referendum of the residents and ratepayers they were elected to represent, to ask whether they want their assets transferred to central government without compensation, so control of water can be passed to iwi.
It is time to put an end to deceptive politicians being able to abuse their positions of power by delivering something they did not promise when soliciting public support on the campaign trail. This kind of political dishonesty should never be allowed in New Zealand and should not be tolerated.