Dr Shane Reti is a patient man, and yesterday he landed a good sledge on Andrew Little after patiently waiting for Little’s propensity for anger to manifest itself in just six minutes.
Dr Shane Reti: Why is it, on his watch, that not only are increasing numbers of people waiting more than 24 hours in EDs but there is also a 50 per cent increase in people waiting more than 48 hours; and, as these wait times have increased, can he name one week recently when an ED disaster has not been in the news?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I want to approach that issue very carefully because the member is leaping to a range of conclusions that cannot be sustained. What I can say is that on my watch, the number of people turning up to EDs has grown phenomenally, so that for successive months we’ve had more than 100,000 people in a month turning up to EDs across New Zealand, and that is the product of a range of factors, but it is mostly the product of years and years of under-investment in our health system by the members opposite when they were in Government. They hate to be confronted with it – they hate to be confronted with it. But one day, some brave member of the National Party is going to rise to say they got it wrong and they should have invested more. They know they can’t, because their policy is to cut taxes and cut spending on essential things like health services.
Dr Shane Reti: What is the waiting time for anger management?
Hansard
Reti carefully stepped through a series of questions, each one putting pressure on Andrew Little, who lasted just six minutes before going off on a rant blaming the previous government for all the failures of the health system, all the while ignoring the impact of five years of his own government’s wasteful spending.
And Little was really teed off; getting angrier the longer he spoke.
Reti must have had the anger management question up his sleeve, waiting for Little to behave as his ‘Angry Andy’ nickname suggests. He wasn’t disappointed and delivered the hit perfectly to howls of derisive laughter.
To his credit, Andrew Little appeared chastened as well as he should have after being shortened up with a cracker of a sledge.
Still, the moniker has stuck and been proven time and time again.
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