Letters: The costly fiasco of GP funding, Samoa deserves compensation for Manawanui sinking

"Health Minister Shane Reti knows some of the solution, which is to implement the 2023 Sapere report on general practice." Photo / Mark Mitchell

Letters to the Editor

The costly fiasco of GP funding

I write with frustration at the behaviour of the current Minister of Health. General practice is struggling for funding and therefore for staff, and as widely reported, services are diminishing.

An example is the loss of the after-hours service on Waiheke Island. This is going to worsen. We know that for every dollar put into general practice $14 is saved downstream in secondary care.

It would seem therefore that more money into general practice is sound financial management, which is what the coalition Government says it stands for.

Minister Shane Reti knows some of the solution, which is to implement the 2023 Sapere report on general practice, which is what he said on radio at the start of this year. He also said that he would move on this. This report advocated for much more funding to go into general practice.

Since then, the opposite is happening. Funding is not keeping up with our rate of inflation. It seems incomprehensible then that Associate Minister of Health Casey Costello has been allowed to squander over $200 million in tax reduction to a tobacco company. Treasury advice was clearly against this, and when she finally, under pressure, revealed her information to support this tax reduction, it did not support it at all.

It is very hard to believe that Costello made this very expensive decision in isolation. Surely, for $200m, Reti should have been more involved, if not Cabinet, in terms of looking at the evidence. If they were not, then this was an abdication of responsibility over this sum of money.

If Reti was privy to this evidence, then it reflects very badly on him. This has turned out to be an embarrassing and costly fiasco which reflects badly on this Government.

Is this all acceptable? If not, where are the consequences? This health budget money should be retained by Government and put into general practice.

Dr Jeremy West, Remuera.

Double whammy

Two contrasting news stories on the same page of Friday’s Herald.

A South Auckland foodbank serving hundreds of families every week is closing for lack of funds. An election-promise scheme to rebate families paying private child daycare fees $75/week is not getting the expected take-up because of the bureaucratic hoops families have to jump through to establish eligibility.

There is no overlap between the beneficiaries of these two programmes. People who can’t afford to feed their families cannot afford private daycare. The rebate scheme is just another poorly thought-through, wasteful, unfair use of millions of dollars per week of taxpayers’ money.

And just some of those millions would keep the ovens on at our hard-pressed foodbanks.

Tim Hazledine, Freemans Bay.

Manawanui compo

This country seems to be shrugging its shoulders at the sinking of the Navy vessel the HMNZS Manawanui on a reef in Samoa.

We should look back and remember what happened when MV Rena ran aground on Astrolabe reef in 2011. A large oil slick developed in the Bay of Plenty. The ship eventually broke in two and 88 shipping containers, some containing dangerous chemicals, broke loose and washed ashore. An exclusion zone was put in place and lasted until 2016.

The Samoan people have every right to feel aggrieved and seek compensation from New Zealand – just as New Zealand sought compensation from the owners and operators of the Rena.

Peter D. Graham, Helensville.

Maritime strategy

New Zealand is a maritime nation fortuitously girt by a very wide moat. We live in very uncertain times and have some significant near neighbours whose strategic interests do not necessarily align with our democratic institutions. It would now appear prudent to develop a robust national maritime strategy to deal with any worst-case scenarios should they arise.

There are several issues that immediately spring to mind. Are the security arrangements for our undersea telecommunications and electricity cables fit for purpose? What have we learnt from enemy raider and submarine incursions during the two World Wars? Is our planning for the protection of shipping, particularly in the focal Cook Strait area, sufficiently robust? Do we need to rethink how we defend our national interests in the South Pacific, the Subantarctic and Antarctica?

The New Zealand Defence Force is, courtesy of unpopular Covid deployments, seriously understrength and the recent loss of HMNZS Manawanui has added to current tasking difficulties.

There is an old adage that a failure to plan will be a plan for failure. I believe that a national maritime strategy should now receive urgent attention by our Government.

Murray Dear, Hamilton.

Broken rates

The rates system in New Zealand is broken. It is a property tax. Why is it that a one-person household pays the same rates for the same dwelling as one with a family-of- five living in it? That family-of-five uses council services far more than one individual. It’s time for an overhaul. Everything else is user-pays so why not rates? Or label it as it is – a property tax.

Keith Moran, Stonefields.