Changes to callout rules a real concern
It is really worrying to hear that the plan to reduce police response to mental health callouts is going ahead. This shows a complete lack of understanding.
Our current Act upholds the person’s right to refuse treatment. This right can only be removed when concerns for the person’s safety or ability to care for themselves reach a high threshold. At that point family or mental health teams may require police assistance to ensure the person attends for a psychiatric assessment.
At no time are mental health professionals able to take someone against their will to be assessed by a psychiatrist. Mental health staff have no legal power to hold, restrain or coerce compliance. That is rightly left to the police.
As a mental health professional I have no right to enter someone’s property uninvited. While I may have the skills to engage and explore what is happening, support families and assess immediate risk, I am legally unable to do so if the person refuses to engage in this process.
The police have always been mandated to manage issues of public disorder. This is core business. However, now that public disorder has been repositioned as mental health they don’t want to do it and mental health staff are legally unable to do it.
What is wrong with us?
Every day day now we hear of the rampages of settler mobs on the West Bank. The UN reported recently that virtually all food and medical aid to Gaza has been choked off by the Israeli authorities.
What terrifies us most is not the silence of our Western political, cultural and religious leaders about these atrocities. Worst of all is that our sensibilities, as with global warming appear so blunted, that this moral bankruptcy is not even recognised.
God only knows what awesome harvest of shame this myopia is bequeathing to future generations.
The master plan
Trump's "Plan 2025" has been successfully pre-empted by Christopher Luxon. The civil service had been hollowed out, as has the social services, the health system, education resources and then privatised the education structure, all utilities and maintenance, fast-tracking boom and bust extractive industries regardless of environmental consequences. Worst of all, not keeping an election promise to finish our new hospital to the original plan.
In true Trump fashion, Luxon gave billions of tax savings for the real estate barons. So embarrassing to have him as our leader.
An apt description
I find Glen Morgan's opinion piece (ODT 28.8.24), in which Morgan equates Luxon with a colonial governor, to be very apt.
However there is something else about Mr Luxon which remains puzzling.
We must, he avers, prioritise science over arts, yet he and his coalition partners are averse to listening to the advice that fully researched science provides. Further he reduces the funding for scientific research in favour of opinions proffered by self-serving entities like gun and tobacco lobbyists.
His avoidance of anything which contradicts his mindset verges towards perverse stupidity. Perhaps a sojourn in a boot camp would help.
Inspiring accounts a boost to young women
Thank you for your report on the National Council of Women Dunedin Branch Inspiring Young Women Breakfast (ODT 20.8.24). As well as Emma Gilmour and author Vanda Symon, whom you named, there were four more excellent speakers: Hannah Power, refrigeration engineer; Shona Low, detective and manager CIB Dunedin; Mandy Hudson-Prattley, CEO at The Grange and Te Awa lifestyle villages/ voluntary governance roles; and Annabel Taylor, paramedic/beekeeper. These six women presented an inspiring account of their careers to the 100 young women present.
Honest contestability
I would like to reply to your editorial footnote which was inserted following my letter (ODT 31.8.24) about the Hobson’s Choice full-page advertisement being rejected by The New Zealand Herald.
You stated that 170 legal academics said that the advertisement was likely to mislead, deceive or confuse customers.
You are talking about a group of people who are overwhelmingly liberal and left leaning and have very little in common with the average person who voted for a centre-right coalition government.
The public are not stupid. The majority see that the protection at all costs of the current interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi is causing unnecessary deep division.
This is because one side of the argument is being silenced by people like the left-leaning Advertising Authority and groups like the 170 academics.
The supporters of the current interpretation of the Treaty are unwilling to have any dialogue on this issue because they know that their position does not stand up to honest contestability.
Address Letters to the Editor to: Otago Daily Times, PO Box 517, 52-56 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin. Email: editor@odt.co.nz
