Out of sight, out of mind

After nearly six years on the Wairarapa District Health Board I still haven’t quite come to grips with just what the Ministry of Health actually does. I do know however that last week it was reported that they had gone cap-in-hand to the government for a bailout of $18 million to complete a $24 million refit to their office tower in Wellington. The refit was supposed to have been paid for out of ‘reserves’, but a miscalculation meant they were well-shy of the mark. How a cash-strapped health system believed it was able to have accumulated twenty-four million dollars in reserves was not explained.

Labour’s shadow health minister Annette King insisted the Director-General Chai Chuah resign, but he resisted falling on his sword and claimed others were at fault.

I have met Mr Chuah on a number of occasions; he is a dapper, quietly-spoken Mayalasian gentleman who cut his teeth in this country working with the Canterbury DHB and then was for seven years the CEO for the Hutt Valley DHB. I understand the he was highly-regarded by both boards.

According to their website the Ministry’s role is to promote and protect the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders. With a twenty-four million dollar refit it would appear that their own health and wellbeing is a priority.

New Zealand has twenty-one district health boards that are semi-autonomous. Often referred to as ‘hospital boards’ in fact they cover all aspects of healthcare in the areas they serve. The government, through the ministry, fund the DHBs on a per-capita basis and most struggle to live within their allocations. Wairarapa’s apportionment is just short of $130 million annually and besides the hospital itself this is used to fund mental health and addiction services - often through private providers - pay the general practitioner subsidies, provide health care for the elderly either in their homes or in privately-owned rest homes, offer dental services for primary school children and fund most prescription medicines.

Wages and salaries are the biggest cost. The Wairarapa Hospital has over 200 nurses and more than 40 doctors on the payroll and also spends a small fortune on information technology. We have outlaid millions of dollars on computer software and hardware during my term on the board and are still behind the eight ball in what is considered to be ideal.

Recently at a meeting I suggested somewhat facetiously that we would be better-off employing clerks with pencils and paper. This suggestion was (justifiably) treated with derision.

And we can’t match the Ministry on the provision of accommodation for our administration staff. Most are housed in the leaky old three-storey rough-cast nurse’s home near the entrance off Blair Street. It was built in the 1940s and has never had a refit. The staff work out of tiny offices that were once the sparse single bedrooms for the on-site nurses of yesteryear.

However I don’t think the government would welcome an application for funds for an upgrade. They will still be battling to find the eighteen million dollar shortfall for the flash capital office block rejuvenation.

Out here in the provinces, we could build a brand new hospital for that.

“Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy” - Oscar Wilde

Read More...

Nice work if you can get it

I wonder how cash-strapped dairy farmers are viewing their Fonterra masters moving into a new glass tower in downtown Auckland later this month. Regarded as the smartest contemporary building in the country, the Jasmax-designed glittering corporate headquarters is described as a bold statement about the dairy giant’s presence in the city.

Critics however say it continues to highlight the disconnection between head-office and the shareholders and many are asking: “Why Auckland?” Given the rural spread of its owners, does it really need to rent prime real estate in one of the world’s most expensive cities at all?

Waikato University agribusiness professor Jacqueline Rowarth said “Fonterra shareholders would rather their company was in the news because of the great job it was doing for them and the New Zealand economy than that they are renting a glossy new building in Auckland.”

The edifice cost $93.2 million to construct and is jointly owned by the Singaporean government and the Goodman Property Trust. It will house more than 1000 staff, many of whom draw salaries in excess of $100,000 annually; it has 100 bicycle parks in the basement and 189 carparks. Visitors to the building will approach the entrance via a landscaped parkland northern-plaza featuring manicured lawns and gardens that are irrigated by rainwater channelled from the building.

Fonterra, whose hopes and aspirations the whole country relies upon, has more than $7.5 billion of debt which percentage-wise starts to look a bit like the $19 trillion American government deficit.

                           ********************************************************

Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder and I must admit I am not particularly beholden to the new flag design. Despite this, I will still vote for it. The majority of those inclined to participate in the process ticked the red, white and blue Kyle Lockwood design in the first box, but because of the convoluted and flawed preferential voting system we ended up with the black, white and blue version which in my view pales by comparison.

The exhaustive procedure was all but hi-jacked by the left-wing twitterati brigade whose Red Peak option was never going to fly, but was designed to abrogate the whole project. A vote for a change looks like support for John Key and there is a section of the public who would do anything to thwart his plans. My ignominious loyalty to the right-of-centre means I will nonetheless opt for the less-than-perfect new flag.

One piece of beauty to which I am beholden however is the Neil Dawson sculpture destined to be placed precariously on Masterton’s Northern approach roundabout. But again, there are detractors. Some don’t like it at all and others like it, but want it tucked away out of sight somewhere in case some demented soul crashes their vehicle into the anchoring poles while admiring its magnificence.

Meanwhile one or two District Councillors are asking for it to be put on hold in case the maintenance of it might prove too much of an encumbrance on the council.

If this sort of attitude was prevalent in Auckland, Fonterra’s head office would be in an old tin shed.

“The key to understanding people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.” - Louis L’Amour

Read More...

The welfare of the born and unborn

Abortion was made legal in this country back in 1977. Various restrictions were applied, but using the best available statistics I can find it would seem in the intervening 39 years around 500,000 terminations would have been carried out. This means half a million people never got to tread the earth on what we euphemistically call “Godzone.”

Ronald Reagan reckoned everyone who is for abortion has already been born, but I’m not making judgements here. However it’s worth thinking about how society might have fared had this not happened.

Among the aborted there will have been a number of genius’s; perhaps some highly skilled surgeons, one or two rocket scientists and even at the pinnacle, a newspaper columnist. Most however will have been ordinary good folk who would have worked hard and minded their own business. And then again there will have been criminals, some of them hardened and sadly violent.

Left to emerge unscathed, the babies will have grown into children who would have filled our educational institutes and presumably so too would their offspring. Perhaps Lansdowne, Totara Drive and Harley Street schools would still be around and thriving.

And maybe we wouldn’t have had to bring in immigrants to do all the work. Phil Twyford would be ecstatic if Asians weren’t buying up all the Auckland housing stock and maybe this would have reduced house prices in the Queen city which in turn will have meant that Bill English wouldn’t have had to agonise over the potential financial implications.

And speaking of English, these new-born’s will have been taught the universal language so when you rang Spark or Vodafone you would be able to understand what the receiver of your call was actually saying. (When I left Wairarapa College I could speak fair French, lousy Latin and great Britain.)

It’s possible that the vast majority of them might have fled to the lucky country during those halcyon days when Australia was lucky. But it was unlucky for New Zealanders who found themselves without the safety net of welfare payments. The Labour Government have always fumed over this mean-spirited action, carefully ignoring the fact that it was Herr Clark pontificating from the ninth floor of the Honey Factory in Helengrad who had decided that the reciprocal arrangements with Australia needed to be kerbed.

This is what she said at the time:

“Australia estimates that it pays NZ$1.1 billion in social security to New Zealand citizens living in Australia. There is a vast difference between that and the NZ$170 million which we currently reimburse Australia for. We do not intend to go further down that road. Our spending priorities must be to attend to the needs of New Zealanders who continue to live here in New Zealand. For that reason the new social security agreement between us will cover only cost-sharing for superannuation and payments for people with disabilities. This will represent savings over the next three years of around NZ$100 million to the New Zealand taxpayer. The New Zealand government is pleased with this outcome and we do believe it is a win-win for both countries.”

The dark side of me can’t help but think; did Mr and Mrs Clark senior ever contemplate an abortion?

“Abortions will not let you forget you remember the children you got that you did not get.” - Gwendolyn Brooks 

Read More...

The universal middle-class malaise

I’m not widely travelled, but I have visited America on three separate occasions and I have observed a group of people whom I suspect feel they have somehow “missed the boat.” They are not a minority group; but in fact American-born males who have graduated from high school, but have not gone on to “college” and got a degree which might have led to better job prospects. As a tourist you tend to observe them as surly porters in hotels or lack-luster gas station attendants when they fill up your left-hand-drive rental car.

Writing in The Australian Financial Review recently correspondent David Frum called them the angriest and most pessimistic people in America. “Middle-aged and middle-classed; not rich and not poor; people who are irked when asked to press 1 for English, and who wonder how ‘white male’ became an accusation rather than a description.” Frum reckons you can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatalities. They express distrust in every institution in American society, not only government, but corporations, unions and even in the political party they normally vote for, the Republicans.

They aren’t necessarily super-conservative and they don’t think in ideological terms, but they do believe that life in America used to be better for people like them and they want that older country back.

And so it’s no surprise that when Donald Trump came along they were the people who told the pollsters “That’s my guy.”

Trump entered the race for the Republican Presidential nomination in June last year with his own mantra of pessimism “We’ve got $18 trillion in debt. We’ve got nothing but problems. We’re dying, we need money, we have losers, and we have people who don’t have it. We have people who are morally corrupt; we have people that are selling this country down the drain.”

“The American dream,” he said, “Is dead.”

He wasn’t taken seriously and even now, despite rising poll numbers, he is still dismissed by the main stream media. Just last week President Obama said he was merely a reality TV star who had no experience to take on the biggest job in the world. This was a bit rich coming from Obama who was a “community organiser” in Chicago before becoming a one-term senator and then the President.

The “reality TV star” reference alludes to Trump hosting prime time TV show The Apprentice for fourteen seasons and his celebrity status is probably why so many people flock to his rallies; thousands as opposed to hundreds who attend his rival’s conventions.

But something has changed since the great recession of 2010. The old slogans ring hollow and rank outsiders like Trump seem less absurd. The moneyed donors of the Republican Party planned a dynastic restoration in 2016 as did the Democrats. Hillary Clinton looked like a shoo-in and Jeb Bush seemed certain to get the nod from the conservatives who poured millions into his campaign.

Instead it has triggered a class war that may pitch billionaire Trump against socialist Sanders.

Fasten your seat belts; the world is in for an interesting ride.

“A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election” – Bill Vaughan

Read More...

Give a little might mean give a lot

In 2008 a Mr Spackman and a Mr Garnham decided to purchase a seven hectare coastal property in the Awaroa Inlet near the Abel Tasman National Park - disparagingly described by some as a sand spit - for $1.92 million. They thought they were paying interest-only on their BNZ loan, but the bank had a different view and has called in the substantial deficit.

To keep the so-called pristine property in public hands, two likely lads from Christchurch, Duane Major and Adam Gard’ner, set up a crowd-funding application on a site called Givealittle to raise about two million dollars, the sort of money it is thought would be needed to purchase the property.

At the time of writing 33,000 people had responded positively

Crowd-funding is a curious form of money-raising, used for all sorts of ventures and is a new favourite of the social media elite.

Gareth Morgan queered the pitch somewhat when he offered to make up the shortfall to an amount not exceeding $600,000 so long as his family could have exclusive use of the land and its environs for fifteen years. When his offer was rejected the outspoken millionaire called the crowd-funding “A nice, innocent, but naïve campaign that will lose.”

I’m a bit confused. Presumably the land has always been in private ownership and it has hardly been despoiled. If a new owner wants to put a multi-million dollar resort on it (unlikely, given the frailty of the land) does it really matter? Meanwhile putting the crowd-funded property in DOCs hands to maintain will just add another cost on the taxpayer.

Most landowners are conservationists at heart anyway, just look at the sheep and cattle stations on the Wairarapa coast; they look better by the year.

And is it really worth two million-plus dollars?

People I know well recently sold a 20 hectare property in the Marlborough Sounds for a fraction of the price being touted for the Awaroa Inlet property. I’m sure they would have liked more, but it has been on the market for a couple of years and they only had the one genuine offer. Covered in native bush, the Sounds property has three private beaches, one of them awash with oysters, and the owners had built a bach, fully consented, inland from one of the beaches so not to spoil the view towards the shore. I’ve never actually been to the property, but family members have stayed there and assured me that it is paradise on earth.

Apparently the native birdsong that you awake to each morning is sensational.

Under normal circumstances it is highly unlikely that there would have been a queue of prospective buyers for the Awaroa Inlet beach. It’s also probable that in those heady days in 2008 the current owners paid more for the land than it is really worth. Crowd-funding however has lifted the profile of the property nationally and possibly even internationally and the participants might be outbid by their own success.

Meanwhile the commission agent selling the property won’t be able to believe his good luck.

I’d love to own a Ferrari. Those willing to help, just go to Givealittle.

“I’d drive a thousand miles just to learn how to conserve gas and help save the environment. But that’s just who I am. I’m a thoughtful guy.” - Jarod Kintz

Read More...

They prostesteth too much methinks

I often wonder what Sue Bradford does with herself on those rare days in Auckland when there is nothing to protest about. Her erstwhile rent-a-mob crowd must be as bored as a Featherston teenager as they idle away the hours contemplating the next move to vent their anger at the government.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) sit-in was a case in point. I watched the live-streaming on my cellphone and was amused by the sheer irony unfolding before me. They interviewed a young lad standing beneath a “Don’t sell out to the corporates” banner wearing a cap with a Nike swoosh and proudly carrying an Apple iPhone; arguably the two biggest corporates in the world.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Some protestors were opposing the flag change. “F*#K John Key”, they shouted and “F*#k John Key’s Flag.” They were proudly bearing our existing flag despite being just metres away from a banner urging “Down with Colonialism”. The Union Jack suddenly looked awfully out of place.

Although the whole TPPA process was initiated by Helen Clark’s left-wing Labour government and despite two former Labour Prime Ministers and two past Labour party leaders fully endorsing the free-trade treaty Andrew Little has decided it’s not good for New Zealand after all.

According to a report in the Dominion-Post Little said: “A draft was available from November last year. I got through possibly 500 pages and it tested my patience.”

This wasn’t a draft of course, but the full 6000 word text, but by his own admission the Labour leader has read less than ten percent of the whole report and then tells us it’s a bad idea. It would appear that Labour’s Foreign and Trade policy is now being driven by life-long Marxist Jane Kelsey.

The madness continued at Waitangi. “They didn’t consult with Maori” was the mantra. Well actually they haven’t consulted with anybody yet. The process now requires ratification by our elected representatives and that’s when the democratic process quite properly takes place.

Hone Harawira went on Radio New Zealand’s morning report on January 21st to claim Maori were near unanimous in not wanting the TPPA to be signed on the basis there was “no mention” of Maori in the TPPA, there was “no mention” of the Treaty of Waitangi in the TPPA and there was “no mention” of the protections for Maori through the Waitangi Tribunal in the TPPA.

The fact that he was wrong on all counts was not picked up by left-leaning Radio New Zealand and it implies that Mr Harawira didn’t even get as far down the track of reading the TPPA document as Mr Little did.

These people are well-paid for their indolence; no surprises there.

I think we are all annoyed that law-abiding Muslims don’t stand up en-masse and condemn the radical section of their religion who are causing mayhem worldwide.

Similarly, given the absolute recognition of the genuine grievances of New Zealand’s original inhabitants and the sincere efforts being made to right past wrongs, it’s a pity someone in Maoridom doesn’t stand up and acknowledge the goodwill that exists in all sections of this nation.

But then again, Sue Bradford would probably protest.

“People will believe anything if you whisper it.” – Karl Kraus

Read More...

Common sense in short supply

Last week I attended a funeral held at the Mahunga Golf Club. It was actually held out on the course during one of these sweltering hot days, but mature trees supplied ample shade for the congregation and the setting with a backdrop of a picturesque lagoon was idyllic. The lengthy sealed driveway into Mahunga is spectacularly tree-lined and provides an expectation of something special at roads end which the beautifully manicured course provides. It is one of those hidden treasures that comparatively few people ever get to see.

The same superlatives can be levelled at the Masterton Golf Club’s Lansdowne course which has a higher profile as much of it can be viewed from a public road.

Both facilities are gems, but my understanding is that the two clubs are struggling financially. Golf is declining in popularity and the necessarily high cost of membership means many simply cannot afford to be involved. Masterton once boasted three thriving golf courses with the 18 hole Riverside Club in Colombo Road. There was also a popular 9 hole public course at the Solway showgrounds.

Mahunga and Masterton’s answer to declining popularity and financial uncertainty is to combine, but don’t hold your breath waiting for this to happen.

There are similar circumstances elsewhere that need urgent answers. The chartered clubs are a case in point. The Cosmopolitan Club’s recently published accounts show a trading deficit and although their well-designed premise looks justifiably valuable on paper, unless it can be used for the purpose for which it was intended then its true value decreases substantially.

I suspect the Services and Citizens Club and perhaps to a lesser extent the Masterton Club will also be showing diminishing returns.

These clubs suffer from the same malaise as the golf clubs. An ageing demography, a low waged economy, but perhaps the most telling of all, a well-resourced constabulary that forcefully frowns upon citizens getting behind the wheel of a vehicle after consuming relatively minor amounts of alcohol.

Golf clubs once subsidised the game itself with profits from bar takings, but most members now exit the premises almost as soon as the game is over, presumably so not to risk a drink-driving charge.

Although the Cosmopolitan Club hosts a number of community groups such as Masterton’s four Probus Clubs it was specifically designed for members to have a drink in a convivial atmosphere. Since the Cosmopolitan Club was built in the 1970s the Masterton Licensing Trust has prudently closed the public and lounge bar facilities at the Pioneer, the Horseshoe and the Homestead. Only the Kuripuni Tavern survives to fly the flag. The huge Homestead building at Solway, sitting next to an expansive but empty carpark, is a sad sign of the times.

Assuming there is little money in hosting funerals, should golf clubs allow their cultivated courses to be turned into upmarket housing estates and are chartered clubs and public bars now considered to be a thing of the past and need to be reconfigured into old people’s homes?

The answer is probably “no” to both questions, but some sort of common sense rationalisation is essential.

“It’s good sportsmanship not to pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling” - Mark Twain

Read More...