Refit of Dunedin Hospital ward block totally possible
Can we please hold the hysteria surrounding the restatement of the long-established position of both the Labour and coalition governments who will not spend any more than the now $1.88b budget on the Dunedin hospital.
There is a solution and former chief executive Chris Fleming is absolutely correct that a refit of the existing building is more than possible.
Excuses such as the building doesn’t have enough stud height for modern services are just noise and are excuses by those lobbying for a new build, paid for by other people’s money. Mr Hodgson and Dr Chambers are guilty of shallow thinking when they all say a refit has been looked at before and would not work.
What has changed is that there is now a very large new outpatient building nearly completed and this will free up space in the existing ward block to allow a staged refurbishment of one or two floors at a time.
Our company completed a comprehensive staged refurbishment of several floors of the ward block over 20 years ago with careful coordination - and with minimal trouble. It is very definitely possible.
The ward block is a reinforced concrete structure built in 1980 and was the country’s largest building project at the time.
To suggest that this building is now at the end of its life after 44 years is simply not credible, and hundreds of millions - and years - can be saved with a judicious refit of the ward block building, and the overall hospital size may even be able to be increased at less cost together with a much smaller inpatient new building.
Russell Lund
Dunedin
Taxpayer rip-offs
As a reasonably experienced builder I have followed the hospital debacle with ever increasing incredulity.
It appears to me that any major project that is publicly funded is seen by private enterprise as a bottomless fund. How can a roundabout in Queenstown cost over $250 million when an entire state-of-the-art hospital starts out at $1.5 billion?
In Wānaka we have a lakeside walkway that looks great but the cost makes our eyes water. The tax and ratepayers of New Zealand are getting ripped off. We do not pay taxes/rates to ensure the ever increasing profits of a very select group of large companies.
I would be very interested in knowing how much we (the people) are paying for a cubic metre of concrete or the final labour rates of workers on the hospital site. Of course we will never know as this information is ‘‘commercially sensitive’’. I'm sure it is! The government is also remiss in not acknowledging the GST content of the project.
Carl Dozell
Wānaka
Hospital for the South
If the hospital was being built in Auckland, it would be finished and functioning by now. Can’t the powers that be get it in their heads this build is to accommodate one-third of the South Island?
Beverley Kay-Donner
Mosgiel
More than just a hospital
So good to see in your editorial (ODT, 27.9.24) that someone has finally mentioned that our hospital is so much more than a hospital for the southern region, but will be a facility that will attract (or not!) top specialists to train our doctors and medical specialists of the future. If we want New Zealanders as a whole to get behind us in our fight, surely this is something that should be emphasised more and brought to everyone’s attention?
Keep up the good fight.
Neroli McRae
Cromwell
Referendum expensive piece of pure nonsense
To those who attempt to sound reasonable while straddling a barbed wire fence on the matter of a referendum on Te Tiriti (1840) and He Whakaputanga of 1835, I offer the succinct opinions of a range of experts from all sides of the political playing field, including Helen Clarke and Jim Bolger and historians Dame Anne Salmond and Vincent O'Malley and Professor of Māori Studies Margaret Mutu.
A referendum of the Treaty is an expensive piece of pure nonsense dependent on a bare-faced lie. Those who argue for it by cherry picking phrases out of context, do so to distort Te Tiriti's promise, to deliver a highly divisive insult and to rip apart the very fabric of our society. Māori signed Te Tiriti to protect themselves from lawless Pākehā not vice-versa.
Hobson's pledge was a hastily written reinvention of the discussed and signed Te Tiriti. Hobson worked to allow the British Crown to trump France's bid to colonise Aotearoa. A bid which could only come to fruition if Māori were misrepresented as having ceded sovereignty to the British.
The British Crown thought it was dealing with a dying race and undoubtedly did so in expectation of never having to deliver on its promises. History shows that this is indeed the way the Crown acted at least until 2014, in direct contravention of the 1840 Treaty it had signed.
Those who argue for a referendum perpetuate a racist myth that Māori are a primitive evolutionarily doomed race. They deny Maori's right to exercise their mana, and seriously misjudge Māori cultural strengths, their tenacity and intelligence.
Marian Poole
Deborah Bay
Contractors to blame for the hospital debacle
The current situation with the building of our hospital started a long time ago.
In 2017 the then-National government announced Dunedin would get a new $1 billion-plus hospital, the largest rebuild in New Zealand’s history, which given the scale of the project could extend the cost to between $1.2 billion and $1.4 billion.
We know what’s happened in the interim with costs, inflation etc, so this current situation should have been discussed long ago when it was realised that this cost was going to blow out by a large margin.
Too often do projects get their ‘‘foot in the door’’ with cost estimates and then when they can’t meet the budget target, expect a government bailout.
Examples are the Christchurch cathedral rebuild and more recently the interisland ferries (in that case the developers spent the money on wharves and then expected a bailout for the ships, which in layman’s terms was like building the garage first and then realising that you can’t afford the car to put in it).
For the hospital build, blame the project management teams and the main contractors for this debacle, not the government. Name them. Shame them.
Consider a massive class action against them for gross mismanagement.
Robert McCallum
Clinton
Explain the $3 billion
I think everyone in Otago and Southland deserves a clear explanation of why there is now a $1 billion cost increase in the new Dunedin hospital under construction.
We should be given a publicly-available list outlining exactly each item that appears to have incurred a 50% cost increase in the last few months.
Chris Adams
Portobello
