And, yes, the government will certainly have noticed the extraordinary outburst of righteous anger from the South.
But will it actually make any difference?
In the short term the estimated 35,000 people marching on the Octagon probably does not worry National too much. It will have noticed the union banners waving proudly in the midst of the march, factored in the consistent left-leaning voters of Dunedin, and decided the march can do it little immediate harm on a New Zealand-wide basis.
Breaking an election promise in such a public way is never easy, and the longer-term challenge for National is to justify the language of Chris Bishop and Shane Reti during their ill-fated trip South the other week.
First they must demonstrably show that the projected cost of the new hospital was going to reach the astronomical levels claimed, and secondly they must then demonstrate just as clearly that the projected overspend is actually being allocated to regional hospital builds, as it was inferred it would have to be, rather than being spent on other alleged ``must haves’’.
Act New Zealand, likewise, can probably shrug off southern outrage with aplomb. Even fewer of the Saturday marchers will have been their voting constituency, and the party's electoral strength is in Auckland, not Otago or Southland.
Its southern list MP Todd Stephenson will likely have to answer some awkward questions, but they should allow him to advance his party’s public-private partnership policies as the way of the future.
New Zealand First, on the other hand, has a much bigger problem in the wake of the hospital downgrade.
Its leader Winston Peters has consistently promised that no-one would be allowed to ``nickel and dime’’ the building of regional hospitals. As Health New Zealand desperately tries to cut things from the hospital plans to bring it down to the government-ordained $1.88 billion budget, it will be difficult to avoid the perception that that is exactly what is happening.
Quite what Mr Peters might be thinking about Dunedin hospital now remains a mystery following the unfortunate cancellation yesterday of his and regional development minister Shane Jones’ trip to Dunedin for the regional economic summit and to open the revamped Hillside Workshops — a new facility which exists in no small part due to the provincial growth fund that New Zealand First secured the last time it was in government.
The coalition agreements allow parties to agree to disagree on some things and it would intriguing to know if this might be one of those things which NZ First begs to differ with its fellow governing parties on.
It is also unlikely that public/private partnerships are big on NZ First’s agenda; its infrastructure election policy pledged the establishment of an infrastructure bank to fund big projects — a public/public partnership, if you will.
Longer term New Zealand First, which claims to be the party of regional New Zealand, will need to guard against similar downgrades to the new Dunedin hospital becoming a nationwide phenomenon.
Not having the backstop of an electorate seat, New Zealand First relies on a broad nationwide vote to crest 5%, and hence is the most vulnerable of the three ruling parties to widespread discontent in the regions.
So long as the polls continue in the relatively consistent way that they are — all three governing parties remain at or about their election night support — few hearts in the Beehive will be fluttering.
But even a drop of a point or two will not be especially alarming. It is still a very long time until the next election, and few elections are decided on single-issue votes this far away from polling day.
Some very excited protesters have written to the ODT claiming that region-wide fury over the hospital cuts could or should spell electoral doom for the coalition parties in the region.
That is incredibly unlikely. Leaving aside for a moment that that rage has to persist for two years before it manifests at the ballot box, the southern seats are seldom flipped. You have to go back to 2005, when Eric Roy won Invercargill for National from Labour’s Mark Peck, for the last time a southern seat changed hands.
The party vote, as well as being the most important, is the most volatile. There have been several occasions across the region where the party which won the seat has lost the party vote, although reading too much into that is a dangerous thing given that the past two elections have been decided on unprecedented nationwide electoral swings.
There is no doubt that all coalition parties will have lost southern votes in the past week: many people voted for them in 2023 on the strength of their promises regarding the new Dunedin hospital.
But whether they had counted on keeping those votes three years into the future is a whole other question.
