The Prime Minister gets into trade negotiations, could we move to the green traffic light setting today and how AT's making streets around schools safer in the latest New Zealand Herald headlines. Video / NZ Herald
Opinion by Mike Hosking
Mike Hosking has hosted his number one Breakfast show on Newstalk ZB since 2008.
Listen live each weekday from 6am on Newstalk ZB.
I assume I'm not the only one who sees the current irony of our hospitals situation.
As we wait with bated breath for the hour to tick over at midnight tonight - and the whole re-engineered world of Andrew Little's health dream to become a reality - back herein the real world, our hospitals aren't coping.
The irony is that we were wanting to avoid this.
We didn't want our hospitals "over run" or "overwhelmed". How many times did the Government roll out that old line during Covid?
To avoid that, we closed the country for two years, it's still not properly open, it's not until next month those wanting visas and work and new lives can apply and actually get in, in any numbers.
Whether or not they actually do will be the next test, could it be our reputation is so tarnished now that those who were interested have found new homes elsewhere?
No, so poorly prepared were we, that closing the country off and creating the hermit kingdom was the only way they could think of so we wouldn't all catch Covid and end up in ED.
One of the concerns expressed at the time was by cutting the country off, we were leaving ourselves open to a flood of new viruses once we did reopen, and so it is coming to pass.
Flu now outdoes Covid in terms of hospital admissions, and guess what, the hospitals can't cope, and the Covid tail is proving hopelessly long, given we didn't roll the vaccines out early enough and the booster campaign has been a bust.
So what exactly did we gain?
We saved the hospitals from Covid, but not from flu. Is that a win?
Well, it would be if in the ensuing period we had hired enough staff and put enough new beds in to cope, but we didn't, so in essence, all we've managed to achieve is to stall the inevitable.
Hospitals are struggling to cope, writes Mike Hosking. Photo / NZME
I wonder if this will turn out to be another of Chris Hipkins' "regrets".
How tall now is the pile of reports that have pointed out mistake after omission after balls up?
Do they all have quiet regrets and just don't verbalise them, or are most of them still hypnotically deluded that what they did these past two years actually seemed like a success?
Can they not see that the EDs that aren't coping right now are a direct result of them basically misleading us into believing that if we closed a border and stopped us getting Covid, that was all they needed to do?
That any other planning whether it be vaccines or beds or staff wasn't actually a prerequisite to getting on top of what inevitably would come our way, when and if we ever returned to normality.
It's the same muddled thinking and lack of delivery that has gone into what will officially arrive tomorrow. The 20 DHBs are consigned to history, replaced by the new centralised health service with its obligatory Māori accoutrements.
Are there more beds? Are there more doctors? Will there be more operations? Has anything actually changed apart from the paperwork and ideology of the administration?
What they are hoping, of course, is that time is the great disinfectant, you will forget all this, a lockdown here, a closed border there, the odd mistake, a couple of apologies, "there was no playbook". Ashley Bloomfield will be well gone, Covid will be politically in the rear-view mirror.
The last thing they need on top of the cost-of-living crisis and potential recessions is our ongoing anger over Covid.
And yet the very reason our EDs are overflowing and the calls of panic are heard daily, is because of Covid - the fact they didn't react properly in the first place and the fact they still haven't learned the lessons two years later.
