The National Party has been promising Dunedin - and the lower South Island - a new hospital since 2008. Despite those promises, the Key government did nothing during its nine years in office, and it was left to Labour to actually start the process in 2017. National promptly criticised them as moving too slow, and continued to promise Dunedin a new hospital. They repeated the promise during the 2023 election campaign. So it was a bit of a shock when on Thursday, they suddenly declared it was "unaffordable" and announced they weren't going to build it after all. And Dunedinites were Not Impressed: 35,000 of them - a quarter of the city - turned out to show their disagreement:
Dunedin's Octagon packed with people on Saturday calling for the government to keep its promise to build the new Dunedin Hospital with no cuts.Its easy to see why: this is vital infrastructure, which serves half the South Island. Downgrading it will mean a permanent reduction in the quality of health care for people in the South. And since everyone needs hospitals at some stage in their life, this is going to hit very close to home for a huge number of people (including people in "safe" National seats in Otago and Southland). Calling it "unaffordable" while dishing out billions for landlord tax cuts, truck motorways in Auckland, or a mega-tunnel in Wellington solely so Luxon doesn't have to see people giving him the finger when he is driven from the airport is a fundamental misunderstanding of the public's priorities, a failure to read the room.[...]
Dunedin Mayor Jules Radich called it the biggest protest in the city of about 134,000 in years.
"Today up to 35,000 people from across the South have come together on Dunedin's streets to express their outrage at proposed cuts to our new regional hospital," he said in a statement.
And its not just about Dunedin. With its mantra of "unaffordable" for everything outside Remuera, what National does to Dunedin could be coming to your city. If you live in Hastings, New Plymouth, or Palmerston North - or their catchment areas - you can just see National sharpening the knives for your local health system. And it will hurt you or someone you love.
This should be a tipping point for the government. When 40,000 people marched down Queen Street to oppose the Key government's plans to mine our national parks, the government got the message and backed down. But the first-term Key government wanted to be re-elected. And I'm not sure that that's actually true of the current government. Quite apart from ACT and NZ First, who do not care about anything other than their corrupt donors, Luxon's National Party is not the Key National Party. Key still had a fair whack of pragmatic conservatives (hence also their desire to seek coalition with Te Pāti Māori and work with them on the foreshore and seabed). But those have now been replaced with crazed ideological glue-sniffers and religious weirdos, who seem to want to wreck our society and burn shit to the ground as quickly as possible. I'm not sure that they will listen, even to mass protest. But if they don't, then they should be a one-term government. The only question is how much damage they will do before being defenestrated by the voters.
