Progress on the new Dunedin hospital was well under way by the time Labour was voted out, Chris Hipkins says.
The Labour Party leader and former prime minister was in Dunedin yesterday and spoke to media after visiting the hospital site.
Earlier this week, Health Minister Dr Shane Reti released several reports that criticised the beleaguered build’s progress largely under the previous government.
The reports comment on below-par leadership arrangements and judge the build project and the wider programme as carrying significant risk of failure.
"When I became the minister, it was clear that the previous partnership model wasn’t working to get the hospital under way.
"So I made changes to the governance arrangements there, and we set up the executive steering group.
"Then we did really get progress, and you can see that, actually, if you drive past it now, you can see that progress has happened. The site was secured.
"The concept was agreed ... two buildings.
"The first of those buildings is well on the way to being completed, and the foundations have already been laid for the second.
"So ... I think we were making a lot of progress."
Last month, Dr Reti and Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop announced the new Dunedin hospital project would proceed in either a down-scaled version or by retrofitting the existing hospital.
Mr Hipkins said exploring retro-fitting the existing hospital was clearly not an option.
"Now that the new outpatient building is well on the way to being completed, to go back to the old site just doesn’t make sense, because you’ll effectively end up with the hospital split between two sites.
"What are they going to do if they decide they need to admit somebody from the outpatient building, wheel them down the road?"
Dr Reti told the Otago Daily Times yesterday the government was absolutely committed to delivering on a new hospital for the Dunedin and the South.
"We’re not cutting the budget — in fact we’re putting up an additional $290 million in capital funding to meet cost pressures."
Releasing documents from previous years was "part of that transparency".
"We’ll be proactively releasing more documents provided to our government in the very near future.
"Mr Hipkins isn’t being upfront about why things went so horribly wrong for this massive project under Labour’s leadership."
Mr Hipkins said it was always going to be a decade-long project.
"You build a hospital of that size and scale, it’s always going to be built over a period of time.
"To get the outpatient building completed would be the first big thing to tick off.
"Then getting the main hospital building completed is going to be a huge undertaking.
"It will be one of the biggest hospital building projects in the southern hemisphere, potentially."
He called on the government to be "upfront" about the costs that were involved to get the project to "approaching $3 billion" figure which they have consistently claimed.
"If they’re including things like IT systems, they shouldn’t be, because the IT system is going to need to be replaced whether a new hospital gets built or not.
"If they’re including things like transformation of patient care, that’s not a building issue.
"If they’re including things like car parking, car parking was excluded from the original scope of the new hospital rebuild."
