I am the owner of several inappropriate T-shirts, gifts from sisters who fancy themselves as comediennes.
This one said "I knit because punching people is frowned upon".
I am not sure when the offending sister thought it might be OK to be seen giving that message publicly.
Maybe Saturday was the day when that sentiment might have been appreciated, even sans knitting needles.
As it turned out, if I had to strip off the merino top covering it, I would still have a blouse to hide it. In the end I chose to swelter in the spring sun.
On the issue of the incessant delays to the hospital rebuild, Richard told Saturday’s crowd: "If I have to listen to one more politician blame another politician, I swear I will non-violently punch them on their Pinocchio noses. They have all had far too long already, but it is this government that broke a promise and it’s this one that is the only one that can fix it."
Who knows how you can non-violently punch anybody, but you get the idea.
As he pointed out, the start of the rebuild process was signed off during his time as Otago District Health Board chairman in 2007.
The rebuild impasse must be particularly galling for people who party-voted National on the basis of its promises about the hospital rebuild.
It would be built "better and sooner under National".
Now who knows what we will get? Two suggestions, rivalling each other in la-la land thinking, have been put up, but perhaps by the time a decision is eventually reached, some third slightly less unpalatable option will be spewed up to trick us into thinking we are gaining something.
Let’s just reject it now.
What this has shown, apart from that every voter should be wary of campaign promises, is that when National makes a promise it does not do its homework.
We saw that with the named cancer drugs debacle, when it made the promise, cynically hoped everyone might not notice it had no proper plan in this year’s Budget, and then ended up having to spend far more than expected because of that.
Patients may be the winners from that in the end, but it is still not clear whether there will be enough staff and required space and equipment to deliver all of the drugs promised in a timely fashion throughout the country, and without spending much more money.
(An August response to questions of Health New Zealand /Te Whatu Ora about medical oncologist vacancies says there were 13.3 full-time equivalent vacancies as of March 31. A question about whether medical oncology units had their full complement of nursing staff could not be answered as HNZ does not have information at that level of detail.)
With the Dunedin hospital rebuild, the government wants us to believe it knew nothing of the issues such as where pathology services would be sited. Really? Perhaps ministers need to read the ODT? This was a controversy months before the election.
What is particularly cynical is the way Health Minister Dr Shane Reti has been stringing everyone along since the election with confused messages about commitment to the rebuild.
I wonder how comfortable he is, as a clinician himself, with many of the decisions the government has made in relation to his portfolio. Should he be locked up at night in case all those dead rats he’s been swallowing are tempting him to run about biting people in the dead of night?
Nor should anyone be sucked into buying the guilt trip that if we build Dunedin hospital properly, other places will miss out. Not funding any of these projects will be a choice made by a government which spent billions on tax cuts.
I want the people of Nelson, where there has also been a backtrack on previous plans, to have their promises fulfilled too.
When I visited the hospital there recently, the bin for discarded face masks outside the entrance was a sorry symbol of the state of the health system.
The lid could not close because it was overflowing. The messy mask mountain got bigger by the day.
The sisters who had been visiting my stepmother over more than two weeks reckoned the bin had been packed to the gunwales whenever they passed it.
Had anybody on the staff scurrying by it every day inquired about why it had not been emptied? Were they all too busy and stressed out fighting their own battles in that clapped-out complex to notice or care?
It wouldn’t surprise me.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
