Tova O’Brien: PM expresses confidence in his health minister despite several red flags
Wednesday, 31 July 2024
Tova O’Brien is Stuff’s Chief Political Correspondent and host of the political podcast, Tova. Listen to her extended interview with the Police Minister in the latest episode, Money, morale and mobsters, here.
ANALYSIS: From the Health Minister to the Chief Executive of Health NZ, there are some very big jobs tenuously teetering on the brink.
Minister Shane Reti is one disaster at Dargaville Hospital away from making the Prime Minister’s unwavering confidence in him look extremely wavering.
The Northland hospital is doctorless overnight meaning it’s relying on telehealth services and nurses and yet, for now, Christopher Luxon says it’s safe.
Asked by Stuff if he’s comfortable that there are hospitals in New Zealand operating without actual doctors, the Prime Minister wouldn’t budge.
He says he’s been reassured by the Minister of Health working with health New Zealand that it's a safe operating practice, “if it’s not, I expect him to take action.”
And that’s enough for Luxon, a reassurance from Shane Reti that having no doctors in a regional hospital is a-ok, safe as houses.
Now, of course, Prime Ministers need to be able to rely on the advice of their ministers and those ministers, in turn, need to be able to rely on the advice of their officials.
But here’s where the public would be justified in losing faith in the domino chain of trust.
The PM and Health Minister have been vociferously telling anyone who’ll listen how little faith they have in the advice and information provided to them by Health NZ.
It’s the very reason they sacked the two remaining members of the Health NZ Board and instilled its interim chair, as its now all-powerful commissioner.
It’s the very reason the Prime Minister told Stuff on Monday that “everything's on the table” when asked if there was a “very high likelihood” that the chief executive and other members of the executive leadership team at Health NZ could be sacked.
There are other red flags the PM should perhaps be prosecuting when considering his confidence in his minister.
It was advice from Reti that Luxon relied upon when he repeatedly claimed there were 14 layers of management “between” the CEO and senior leaders at the top of Health NZ and the patients they serve.
Problem is, as The Post revealed, the organisational chart actually shows the patient was included in the supposed 14 layers of management, as was the board chair and the chief executive, their chief of staff and someone simply called “team member” who could feasibly be a nurse or doctor.
Though the PM seems unfazed by being handed potentially junk advice, “woopty doo” he told Stuff when challenged, “you’re arguing it’s maybe 13 not 14, woopty doo, it’s still a big problem.”
Another potential red flag for the PM to consider when dishing out confidence, is that it was his Health Minister who spearheaded arguably the government’s greatest ballsup so far this term. Promising to fund cancer drugs, failing to fund them and then scrambling to come up with a fix when they were smashed by the inevitable backlash.
A third enormous red flag, is that Shane Reti - while giving assurances that having a doctorless hospital up north is tickety-boo - could not tell Stuff how many other hospitals in New Zealand were edging close to similarly acute staffing levels - or if indeed they’d reached the same zero doctor status.
“I’d have to look that up,” Reti said, “there’s a large number of hospitals and peripheral hospitals,” was his rationale.
As former health minister Chris Hipkins put it: “If someone said to me, ‘hey, we've got a problem with a hospital, it doesn't have any doctors’, one of my first questions would be, are there any other hospitals in this situation?”
Short of the minister asking those questions, the Prime Minister - who’s relying on his minister’s assurances - should perhaps encourage him to do so.
It might give Christopher Luxon more confidence in the confidence he’s expressing in Shane Reti.