Monthly Archives: Jun 2018

Nurses strike averted, but long way to go

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On Thursday night whilst catching up with friends at a bar, I was talking to a nurse about the impending strike action that she and her colleagues were to engage in next week. She told me that the strike had not been an easy decision to make, but that the Union members had made very clear that current conditions of their work were not tolerable.

The strike had been set down for 05 July 2018. Starting at 0700 hours hospitals, medical centres and other medical practices would be subject to a 24 hour strike action, during which time widespread cancellations of surgery and the normal duties expected of nurses would have occurred.

I am pleased that an improved offer has been been made to the Nurses Union. The offer means that the N.U. has now withdrawn the notice of intention to strike for 05 July 2018, so that the terms of the new offer may be considered and the Union vote on whether or not to accept them.

However there is a long way to go. Quite aside from the fact that there were two dates marked for potential strike action, the N.U. will not be wanting to settle for anything less than a quite substantial improvement in pay and conditions. Nine years of under funding and wrongly prioritised spending has left New Zealand nurses in a precarious position. I have described in a previous article what conditions the nurses around New Zealand work in.

But it is important to note the ethical considerations that need to be made as well. Not being able to work in a safe environment and be appropriately renumerated for their efforts undermines them as professionals working in the most humane and life giving profession there is.

It also sends the wrong and messages about the value of a critical component of the medical workforce. It needs to be in a position where it could be realistically expected to do the job expected, and that means establishing as far as realistically appropriate physical and contractual working conditions. Because at the end of the day a fatigued, distracted, or disaffected nurse poses a risk to his/her colleagues, patients and other people by not being in the right state to do their job.

The nurse at the bar will be encouraged by the new offer and the opportunity to delay very serious strike action that would have caused massive disruption across New Zealand. If we are lucky, this will be sufficient for the N.U. to cancel the strikes altogether and make 05 July 2018 a normal working day.

Unacceptable risk posed by quake prone hospital buildings

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Staff working in Christchurch hospitals have expressed concerns that the buildings they are working in pose an undue risk in an earthquake. Furthermore the staff are concerned that they have only one option: accept the risk or resign.

It is all the more unacceptable to have these buildings in such a state as they are in a city still recovering from New Zealand’s worst seismic disaster in 80 years. The Canterbury District Health Board should not be treating this in the manner that it is, as C.D.H.B. will bear responsibility for any failure of duty of care to all those working and around the buildings on a day where they fail or suffer significant structural damage in an earthquake.

The staff are right to be concerned. It is not paranoia or anything else – aside from a duty of care to their patients to make sure that they are in as safe an environment as possible during their time of care there, staff also have the right to know that they will be safe in delivering that duty of care.

I am concerned that Christchurch as a city, and the C.D.H.B. as a Government entity are not recognizing and upholding that unspoken promise many of us would have made in mourning the passage of those who died, to learn the lessons of 22 February 2011. What example are we setting for future generations by failing in this relatively simple yet fundamentally important task?

Homes for $200,000? Winston Peters hopes so.

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Acting Prime Minister Winston Peters has spoken of his desire for housing that costs not more than $200,000. The New Zealand First leader, speaking of a time when a person on a then living wage could afford a property relatively easily, was speaking of the aspirations of the Government – of a time and housing framework that allowed new families with relatively small discretionary money to be able to buy their first property.

There are a number of factors to consider in the likely price of affordable properties built from bare ground:

  1. Due to the relatively small pool of tradespeople that New Zealand has, skilled labour is always going to cost once one has added up ACC cover, Kiwi Saver investments on top of wages.
  2. The cost of obtaining resource consent from the consenting authority and any associated legal proceedings that it may have to go through
  3. Connecting the property to existing infrastructure – it must have water, sewerage, power and a driveway or other vehicle access

These factors might also be influenced by outside forces such as demand at the time for tradespeople on large commercial and industrial projects. Another is the availability of building materials that are not manufactured in New Zealand. A third and more controversial one is the availability of affordable land. A combination of increasingly competitive market forces, urban sprawl encroaching onto good arable land and a tendency towards purchasing big sections that we do not necessarily need raises challenges.

I doubt though that any decent houses will cost less than $300,000 unless there is a change in building attitudes among buyers. Is big and flashy always good? Not necessarily. I am not suggesting that everyone seek out granny flats, but if we want a serious reduction in house prices, we as New Zealanders need to be honest with ourselves: apartments, smaller and better self contained units with small floor space are going to have a much bigger say in the future.

Location. Location. Location (not the programme that used to be on TV1 – though the name certainly gives a good hint about this next talking point). The unequal economic development in New Zealand means that Auckland continues to be more of a magnet than it should be for people and the resulting population pressures are contributing to the sky high costs of renting. Much more effort needs to be made to draw economic development to other parts of New Zealand.

Finally, as I have mentioned before and which has been extensively debated in the media, the large number of migrants entering New Zealand puts further pressure on an already pressurized market. This was the subject of considerable debate at the last election. What numbers could be considered sustainable remain a point of contention and depend on ones point of view. Measures were announced by the new Government shortly after Labour-New Zealand-Greens took office in October 2017, but it is too early to tell what impact they will have.

It was announced for example just yesterday that a 15 story apartment building is proposed for Hobsonville. Few if any apartment blocks in New Zealand are that tall. It also remains to be seen in a country that prefers its housing developments to be lateral rather than vertical how long it will take for the market to cotton on to the idea.

Regions need an economic boost

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One of the key economic themes at the election was getting New Zealand’s regions moving again. For decades a slow, but steady drift of people to the urban areas has been going on. Some how the regions have soldiered on, wondering what it will take to be noticed in the corridors of power. but with living costs in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch getting expensive pushing people out to smaller centres around the country, what is there to help these places get growing again?

The traditional answers have been “lets get dairy projects going – everyone likes dairying” or “lets get services back into these communities, like banks, and so on”.

However the economic boost should be looking at diversifying the product coming out of the regions, rather than further stoking a select few industries. For too long New Zealand has had a habit of focussing on primary industries, that whilst they have given us huge returns on what we have put in, have also come at significant cost. Also, there is a risk that goes with not having spread the proverbial eggs through sufficient baskets – if one collapses and all of the eggs are in it, there goes the economy. New Zealand has its eggs largely in tourism, dairying and a few others. Neither the Labour-led coalition Government of Prime Minister Helen Clark, nor the National-led coalition Government of Prime Ministers John Key and Bill English made sufficient effort to diversify.

But there are ideas as to what could be done. What needs to happen though is a willingness to look outside the quite enclosed box that severely limits our ability to envisage a long term future.

One idea for example, noting that a Chinese company wants to build a Waste to Energy plant on the West Coast, is explore the feasibility of putting the waste that it would consume on rail. It would serve a two fold purpose. Aside from taking more than the equivalent of trucks of waste off the road, it would help pay the for the cost of helping to keep the Otira railway tunnel open.

In East Cape and around Gisborne I note that provisional plans are being put in place to grow marijuana that could be used for medicine in the event that marijuana be legalized. This, again, would help people who might otherwise spend their lives on the dole, or in and out of jail get some legitimate employment. It would also help decrease drug crime in the communities. A similar project could be launched in Northland too, if the demand exists.

In smaller urban areas, where large or heavy industrial or commercial development might not be so feasible, thought should be given to developing niche industries that are specific to those areas. These could be many and varied, ranging from developing ecological and/or historical sites of interest into tourist attractions, to small localized gold mining businesses – mining does not need to be open cast or done in a tunnel, as opportunities for alluvial gold mining are known to exist in places such as the West Coast.

Dunedin is a unique case. Significantly smaller than Wellington or Christchurch and about as large as the Napier-Hastings metropolitan area, it is possible to sometimes feel forgotten by the Government if one lives in the university town. Built on mining in the 1800’s, made world famous in New Zealand by the movie “Scarfies”, and unique for its strong Scottish heritage, Dunedin’s population has until recently either been static or in slow decline. The loss of the Southerner passenger train in the 1990’s, the closure of the Hillside railway workshops and the Cadbury factory closure all cost Dunedin hundreds of jobs. What would it take to get some of these industries back there?

Are job cuts at I.R.D. really a sign of modernisation?

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It has been announced that in a bid to modernise the Inland Revenue Department and the services it offers, 1,500 jobs are going to changed or ended between 2018 and 2021.

But there is a limit as to what a computer or automated service can achieve. There will always be a few clients whose queries on a given day do not fit within the design parameters of a computerized system, no matter how well run it is. There will always be inefficiencies in handling the data feed, again no matter how well run it is.

I have rarely reached the I.R.D. on the phone on the first attempt. Nearly always I have had to be placed in a queue to be rung back sometimes over an hour later. Okay, fine, but I am sure there have been instances when for one reason or another people ringing I.R.D. simply did not have an hour to spare waiting for a call back.

There will be a whole host of other issues as well, big and small that will not fit in the straight jacket of modernization. Such as:

  1. Elderly and those on low incomes without access to a computer will rely on paper and telephone for details, so there will always need to be someone who can talk to a deaf or sight impaired customer
  2. Computers are not good at spotting mistakes (and possibly not at spotting deliberate deception – only a human can do that), and artificial intelligence still has work to do in this field
  3. For purposes of quality control, there will always need to be human oversight of some sort

Optimum calibration might not be a term in government agency jargon yet, but it might as well be. It would refer to a system with the best calibration that can be achieved – everything is running as well as it can, the system parameters are suitable and doing their job – in other words anyone who thinks a “fix” is needed would be well advised to leave it alone. In a perfect world, “optimum calibration” would be the definition of everything is running perfectly. The reality, somewhat different as it is, is that maybe 95% of the time this is nearly true.

The services expected to be provided by a Government agency are considerable. As the collector of tax on the Government’s behalf I.R.D. is loathed by some, but the vast majority of people understand that in order for the Government to pay for its expenditure it has to raise money somehow. The tax code in New Zealand might seem complex and at times inefficient to a New Zealander, but when you compare it to say the United States Federal tax code – more than 1 million words long someone told me – perhaps it is not so bad.

So, what does one make of a big agency tasked with one of the most essential jobs in New Zealand?

Imperfect would be a good word. Like all New Zealand Government agencies it has been subject to controversy. In 2012 it was subject of a huge privacy breach involving more than 6,300 people. At the time the Minister for Revenue, Peter Dunne, said that measures were put in place to stop it happening again.

But compared with the I.R.S. in the United States or Her/His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs office in the United Kingdom, New Zealand is comparatively lucky to have a transparent and – for the most part – accountable revenue collector. I sincerely doubt there is a single person in the U.S. who knows their federal tax code for what it is inside out, and every time I think about it I wonder how much would be gained by Americans from a bottom up overhaul of it.

So, when you next get on the phone to the Inland Revenue Department to query your finances, ask for assistance, compliment them or lay a complaint, just remember the person on the other end has to pay tax too. The very vast majority of them – there are always a couple of rotten apples in each department – honestly want to help. Be grateful that their call centre is in Wellington and not in another country.