The demand for a free service is infinite. Three free visits to the doctor a year will overwhelm GP clinics and cause wait times to blow out.
Today, the annual cost of partial GP payments is $1 billion a year.
When the 30% who do not visit the doctor make their three visits, it will cost another billion a year.
Is Labour manufacturing an excuse to increase the assets covered by its capital gains taxes?
A Labour Party that was in touch would have started by identifying voters’ real problems and then working out practical solutions.
Today, an issue in my valley is addiction – particularly P.
Last week, police raided the valley’s dealer’s house and found stolen firearms. He is on the run.
The previous week, a young man was released from prison on Friday after serving eight months for alcohol- and P-fuelled offences. He immediately went on a bender. Penniless, I paid for him to have somewhere to stay until the welfare opened.
Rotorua was housing the homeless in motels. Now the homeless are in tents in a caravan park.
In the past seven years, this young man has been imprisoned five times for offences committed while on drugs or alcohol. His imprisonment has cost the taxpayer at least $400,000, not counting police, courts, and welfare costs.
Not once has he been offered rehabilitation.
When sober, he is a good worker and loving father. Under the influence, he is a different person. He told me that in his last prison stint, he asked for rehab, but it wasn’t available.
Just as well – Corrections’ 2024 Annual Report reveals that its prison drug-rehab programme increased offending.
Had Labour begun its policymaking by identifying issues that need solving, then the P epidemic would have been a priority.
Wastewater testing in Kawerau found one in 10 adults were P users in 2019.
A Government-commissioned study estimates that alcohol and drugs cost New Zealand around $11b a year. The direct cost to the taxpayer is roughly $3b.
This estimate was prior to last year’s wastewater testing detecting a 96% increase in P use.
A policy that reduced addiction could save taxpayers the $700m Labour intends to raise through capital gains taxes.
There is a programme that works. Graduates of the Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Courts have an 86% lower reoffending rate than comparable offenders sent to prison.
Even counting those who drop out, reoffending still falls by 45% – a world-leading result.
But our young man can’t access it. The courts operate only in Auckland, Waitākere and Hamilton.
They handle serious offences driven by addiction. Offenders who plead guilty are sentenced to 12–18 months of supervised rehabilitation under a judge’s oversight. Graduate and you receive a community sentence; fail and you face imprisonment.
When Andrew Little was Justice Minister, he promised to expand the courts nationwide. The Ministry of Justice advised Cabinet that the courts were too costly and “only marginally cost-effective” – returning $1.33 for every $1 invested. Little shelved expansion, saying the model needed “refinement”.
Criminologist Roger Brooking suspected something didn’t add up. After more than 70 Official Information Act requests, he discovered that if ministers had read past the executive summary to the appendix they would have seen the real success rate, 86%.
Re-analysing the figures, Brooking found the true return was $7.85 for every $1 spent.
He also reviewed all 13 rehab programmes run by Corrections. The average reduction in reoffending was just 3.9%. Taxpayers spend about $300m a year on prison rehabilitation that barely works.
By contrast, an alcohol and drug court cost about $3m a year. Rolled out nationally, the courts could cut reoffending by nearly half among addicted offenders – saving lives, families and vast sums of public money.
If Rotorua had such a court, that young man might still have his family, home, and job – a future. Instead, he remains a burden on taxpayers when he could be a contributor.
Instead of envy-driven taxes, Labour MPs should read Brooking’s blog. Labour should promise to stop wasting hundreds of millions on rehab programmes that don’t work and to fund community ones that do.
We will never “win” the war on drugs, but we don’t have to lose so badly. With Alcohol and Drug Treatment Courts and community rehab programmes, we could cut the cost to the country of addiction by billions of dollars a year and give children, like that young man’s son, their parents back.
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