Some things never change, like health funding shortfalls and John Howard. The perennial bogey of health funding saw nurses striking in Canterbury, radiation therapists striking around the country and cancer patients going to Australia for treatment.
By December the Government had announced an extra $2.4 billion funding over the next three
years, and was promptly greeted with claims that it would be swallowed by spiralling health board deficits.
Yet again, the country reeled at senseless murders, beginning in January with the vicious deaths of jogger Margaret-Lynne Baxter in Flaxmere and Auckland newcomer Nicholas Clarkson in the downtown streets. This month the murders of Wayne Johnson, Mary Hobson and Bill Absolum at the Mt Wellington Panmure RSA and sisters Saliel Jalassa Aplin and Olympia Marissa Jetson in Masterton gave the year a horrible sort of symmetry.
Between, hope was raised that the murder 14 years ago of 6-year-old Teresa Cormack might finally be solved when new forensic tests revealed her killer's DNA. The tests cleared more than 500 suspects by December, among them the man thought most likely. Police were still taking blood samples from others.
The perenial plight of refugees came into the news again both with the war in Afghanistan and the traffic in human cargo.
Across the Tasman, Prime Minister John Howard thanked his lucky stars that a boatload of asylum-seekers helped him join the exclusive club of three-time Prime Ministers Sir Robert Menzies, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke. Mr Howard had been all but written off earlier in the year. But that was before the Tampa refugees and the September 11 attacks gave him an opportunity to simultaneously whip up prejudice and play the safe pair of hands, sending Labor leader Kim Beazley into political oblivion in the process.
Also across the Tasman, former All Black Keith Murdoch remained enigmatic, with a question mark still hanging over his role in the death of 20-year-old Christopher Limerick last year. In October a coroner referred the case back to police after finding that Murdoch had given suspicious evidence at the inquest. But Australian police said they were unlikely to reopen the suspicious-death inquiry.
2001 – The year in review
