Mr Bishop’s Facebook post from that September 27 visit says the pair came to the city ‘‘to be completely upfront with local government leaders, health leaders and local MPs’’.
The message was that the hospital, as currently designed, was too expensive, could not be delivered within the $1.88 billion budget, and it was now possible it could approach $3b.
Accordingly, they told us they would be seeking urgent advice on scaling back the inpatient building or a staged redevelopment on the existing hospital site.
In a laugh-out-loud moment, Mr Bishop’s Facebook post said ‘‘the people of Dunedin deserve transparency about this poorly-managed project — and so do all the taxpayers who are funding it. We have been working hard to provide that transparency’’.
That certainly has not been this newspaper’s experience.
Curiously, Mr Bishop’s post did not mention the announcement signalled wanton breaking of National’s election campaign promise over the hospital rebuild.
‘‘Up to’’ and ‘‘approaching’’ are handy terms to use next to amounts of money when you are either trying to frighten people about wasteful spending or convince them they are going to be better off from your largesse — think National’s promotion of its tax cuts as an example of the latter.
The hope is listeners will only hear the big number and ignore the finer details. The more you repeat it the more embedded the number becomes.
As anyone with any experience of building costs knows, the cheapest time to build is today, and the longer this government spends dithering about big-ticket items such as the Dunedin hospital rebuild and the interislander ferry, the more expensive they become.
With time marching on and the costs increasing daily, the government may be getting more and more desperate to penny pinch on this project.
It is not news Chris Bishop is keen on public-private partnerships.
Fresh to the infrastructure role, he was quoted as saying ‘‘build and lease-back arrangements would entrust reputable, expert infrastructure developers with the building and maintenance of new and existing hospitals, which are then leased back to the public sector for long-term public use’’.
Whoever took on this work would need to be assured of big profits at every turn and the temptation to cost-cut on the maintenance would seem inevitable. We have previously described it as financially fanciful at best.
The issue with the publicly funded model is years of robbing Peter to pay Paul when it comes to maintenance, and next to no long-term infrastructure planning and oversight, due to changes in government and some pork barrel politics.
It would make more sense to sort that out than think private enterprise will save the day.
It is impossible to see any advantage to the taxpayer in the idea the shiny new outpatient building should now be flogged off to private enterprise so that money could be used to help fund the in-patient building. This idea needs to die now.
Selling the crumbling existing ward block when it has been vacated further down the track to raise a few bob to offset costs might make some sense.
We hope the various consultants having another crack at the ludicrous idea of refurbishing the ward block have spoken to all those involved in the revamp of the intensive care unit. That took years longer than expected because of issues uncovered in the process and the difficulty of undertaking such a project in a functioning hospital.
Tonight, at a meeting in the Dunedin Town Hall, southerners will have another opportunity to show support for the ongoing campaign to have the hospital built as planned and promised.
Among the speakers will be retired intensivist and general surgeon Mike Hunter, whose thoughtful and detailed opinion pieces on the rebuild issue should be required reading for anyone interested in the subject.
We hope the government has been paying attention.
