The new hospital is for NZ, not just Dunedin
I note with concern that Blake Lepper of Health New Zealand is committed to "delivering a Dunedin hospital that provided the health services needed for the local community".
This project is supposed to provide necessary health services to the whole southern region, not just the local community. Given its role in research and medical training it is actually a hospital that serves the whole nation, and the global community.
Can we have an assurance from Blake Lepper, Lester Levy and Shane Reti that there is no intention behind all the dissembling to reduce the project to only a local hospital?
Underfunding the issue
I have followed with concern the delays in building a new hospital for Dunedin and the southern region. All of the cuts and downsizing are due to underfunding. It is not a case of bad management or overspending. The problems arise because for 40 years now our governments have consistently believed that tax cuts for the rich are more important than properly funding our hospitals and our schools.
Your campaign "They Save, We Pay" is very much appreciated.
Keep your promise
Building a hospital is complicated. And simple. Simple here because Christopher Luxon and Shane Reti came to Dunedin just a year ago and promised they would complete ours to specification. Some believed them.
The government has kept its promise to big landlords. It’s time to keep the promise to Otago and Southland.
Local MPs Miles Anderson, Joseph Mooney and Penny Simmonds — and Mark Patterson and Todd Stephenson — need to get the promise-makers to Dunedin to repeat their commitment.
And this time to deliver on it.
Think of the future
The government’s plans to reduce the size of the new Dunedin hospital are completely at odds with its policy to focus on adapting to the consequences of climate change. Scientists agree that, as the temperature rises to 3°C or more above pre-industrial norms or more in the next decades, we can expect a significant population flow into our region not only from an uncomfortably hot North Island but from uninhabitable cities overseas.
Sensible adaptation preparations mean we will need a larger hospital than originally envisaged, not a smaller one. Perhaps the government’s right hand of health might care to consult with its left hand of climate policy? Or do the needs of our children’s generation not matter?
No thanks Wayne
To the mayor of Auckland: I am not dying for a Ford Ranger.
Well-drawn, but cartoon missed the key point
Yesterday's well-drawn Yeo cartoon (ODT 10.9.24) unfortunately misses a key point.
I am already working with health professionals and clinicians, and lobbying the government, with one goal in mind — to head off any clinical cuts to a hospital that has been thoroughly well-designed to meet the community’s needs.
That’s what the current government has promised to deliver and our message to government is clear: keep your promise. Council, clinicians and the communities of Otago and Southland are watching closely.
Just wondering
As the government fully owns KiwiRail, who fully owns the Cook Strait ferry that broke down and was fined $432,500 plus costs for endangering lives, which fully owned taxpayer enterprise will the fine be paid to? Also, who receives the costs?
Does such an internal transfer of taxpayers’ funds actually achieve the purpose of such a fine?
How does it benefit the taxpayer by giving another taxpayer-owned enterprise an unexpected financial windfall?
Argument is unreliable, it’s undeniable
Bernard Jennings (Letters ODT 7.9.24) claims because science has got it wrong in the past, it is never reliable. Bernard’s examples do not support his argument.
Medical science never promoted smoking. The tobacco companies did, misrepresenting doctors who had been sponsored by tobacco money and products.
It was whistleblowers who were researchers for tobacco companies who revealed the effects of smoking. This resulted in scientific institutions conducting independent research confirming the lethality of smoking.
Bernard employs the same fallacious reasoning about our solar system. Scientists did not claim the Earth was the centre. That belief might have been widespread among the laity but that was because of the teachings of the church not science.
In fact a number of Greek and Arab scholars knew this in ancient times. An astronomical device rescued 120 years ago from a shipwreck off the Greek Island of Antikytheria confirms that.
As for climate change and greenhouse gases, Eunice Newton Foote, an American scientist, and Irishman John Tyndall separately demonstrated and reported the effect of carbon dioxide on global temperatures in 1856 and 1859.
Eunice hypothesised that changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would alter the climate. This has been abundantly confirmed by subsequent scientific research.
Casual inspection of oil company webpages reveal they no longer promote denial of global warming but resort to a variety of other delaying strategies. If the oil companies and scientific institutions around the world admit it who are we to deny it? This is what we mean by consensus.
[Abridged: length. Editor]
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