Richard Prebble
Columnist, former cabinet minister and ACT Party leader.
When I was in Labour Youth, a veteran MP explained that if the government owned bakeries, every time someone found a hair in a loaf of bread the government could fall.
Should the Greens ever establish their KiwiMart, television news will have a permanent slot for government supermarket horror stories.
We have a monolithic, Soviet-style, government-owned hospital system employing tens of thousands and treating hundreds of thousands of patients.
Every election brings hospital horror stories.
But this year TVNZ’s 1News at Six has gone overboard, adding special investigations.
Editors can justify the coverage by pointing to polling showing seven out of 10 believe the health system is in crisis.
But when television runs hospital horror stories night after night, often featuring union representatives warning of collapse, what came first? The coverage or the polls?
During the 2002 election campaign, I caught pneumonia and was admitted to North Shore Hospital. I spent my first night in a bed in the corridor.
I know from personal experience that corridor beds are nothing new.
In a system this large, staff retire, resign, fall ill or take leave every day. Somewhere, a ward will inevitably be short-staffed.
Yet the official statistics tell another story.
New Zealand had 27.8 per cent more registered and enrolled nurses in 2025 than in 2020, and 16.2 per cent more doctors.
Health NZ’s latest quarterly results show improvements in 19 of 25 performance measures compared with a year earlier.
And the Opposition’s answer? Labour’s big health announcement this week was to promise two more reviews. What is that going to solve?
Until we have real reform, health will remain a recurring political crisis.
Singapore achieves some of the world’s best health outcomes with a very different healthcare model.
Why aren’t we debating how it does it?
This article was originally published by I’ve Been Thinking.
