Why must free market neoliberal solutions that got us into this clusterfuck in the first place always the stupid solution?

Right now our public hospital system is falling over BECAUSE OF COURSE IT WILL FALL OVER!

We just went through a once in a century pandemic, our grotesquely underfunded public health system needs to be nationalised and fully funded by a taxation system that lifts the yoke from working people and puts it on the corporates and the speculators.

Anyone reading Comrade Ian Powell on our blog will see how blinded Labour have been by the corporate consultants who have looked to carve out their own interests over public health issues…

I began by recognising that the incoming Labour-led government in 2017  inherited from its National-led predecessor a health system in crisis due to severe workforce shortages. Because of its centrality a workforce crisis is by definition a health system crisis.

However, while knowing this to be so, the new government largely ignored the pre-pandemic crisis and the pressures driving it such shortages, increasing acute demand greater than population growth, and worsening illnesses in communities largely due to social determinants of health.

The effect of this deteriorating situation impacted “…severely on access to planned surgery and other treatments, overcrowded emergency departments, availability of hospital beds, and compromised capacity to diagnose patients in a clinically timely manner.”

Covid-19 was not the cause of the workforce crisis; it was an accelerator.

…on Public Health, Labour zigged when they should have zagged. They allow all the other Ministry’s  ride rough shod over Labour’s goals, yet on public health they’ve taken the corporate advice over the Ministry.

We always seem to fall back on more free market solutions from people with a vested interest in that outcome.

Take our nursing shortage, all Luxon is offering is to open the immigration flood doors exactly like Key did so that poor old Auckland has to once again deal with unfettered mass migration that cause our rents to explode and infrastructure to grind to gridlock again.

All Luxon is offering is to import nurses RATHER THAN actually solve the fucking problem!

And here’s the fucking problem

1 – Our tax yoke is locked onto the poor citizen rather than the wealthy elites so we never have the money we need for public health.

2 – Rather than import more nurses, grow and keep who we have! Rather than debt enslave the next generation of nurses, we offer free training, free student allowances and free public transport and free accomodation to study rot be a n nurse AND THEN bond those nurses to NZ for 5 years!

We need to reignite the social contract between our essential service staff like teachers, police, nurses, drs etc etc etc – we will pay your education, you stay here and give us 5 years service.

That way we don’t simply train local nurses, give them. debt and they flee overseas for better pay to clear that debt!!!!

Why aren’t we looking at real solutions like protecting our nurses and promoting them and enabling them rather than use them as cheap tokens on a rigged free market game that we will always lose?

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