converser.nz

Month: August 2020

  • Canon David Morrell: “The Government must move decisively, and not by handing the problem to the Ministry of Health – it would appear far too likely to have created it.”

    Canon David Morrell is a former Christchurch City Missioner and a Canon of the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch. He was an elected member of the Canterbury District Health Board from its inception in 2001 until last year’s CDHB elections – sitting for a total of 18 years. His commentary on the Health Board issues appears…

  • Waiting On The NZ Government In CDHB Debacle

    In the last few days the NZ Government has taken steps to meet with the CDHB Board and protesting health staff to discuss their concerns, alongside the first steps to implement staff and resourcing cuts in the Board’s operations following Board approval of a $56.5 million cut in expenditure this week. Some Board members and…

  • Does The Government Have Any Major Health Policy At All?

    Labour is campaigning to be re-elected in a few weeks, and has ruffled a lot of feathers by declining to issue any policy manifestos, saying they are “too busy” with the Covid-19 crisis. The real question, however, is whether Labour has any major policy in a number of areas, including health. During the 2017 election,…

  • Can The Covid Card Really Work?

    In these Covid-19 pandemic days in NZ and worldwide, the powers that be have had to come up with effective ways to be able to trace infected people’s personal contacts lest they also turn out to be infected with the virus. It is entirely natural that some sort of technological solution should be sought, and…

  • Crown monitor claims CDHB was financially mismanaged

    So the war of words over Canterbury DHB continues, this time with an interview in The Press today with Lester Levy, claiming Canterbury DHB’s deficit “has grown out of control”. Levy was appointed Crown Monitor to the CDHB board last year and is a former chairman of all three Auckland DHBs. However, the counter claim…

  • How To Get A Very Cheap “Landline” Phone Over The Internet

    These days a lot of people are less inclined to have a traditional “landline” phone as Spark will still charge around $30-40 a month to keep providing the service which may be used relatively infrequently. As Chorus are planning to eventually turn off their old copper network in favour of fibre, everyone will sooner or…

  • Bye Bye Blogger

    This blog is now closing and moving to WordPress. This is due to Google’s arrogance in forcing everyone on Blogger to move to a bug ridden new user interface that they should have spent more time testing and fixing before they made it mandatory. Google has also been dictatorial in forcibly removing email notifications on…

  • Does the NZ Government have any comprehensive policy on fixing the public health system?

    It seems appropriate at the moment for us to continue documenting the unfolding CDHB crisis and asking some hard questions relating to this. In our last post yesterday, the key question asked related to this actual issue. Simply put, the Government has to date failed to take any sort of lead and front up to…

  • NZ Pandemic Response Raises Questions Over Future Structure of Health System

    We’re still evolving what this site is about and how we will use it, but we are sticking for now with our plans that it won’t be a general political site, but that we will continue to use it to address a small selected range of issues that we feel are of key importance. The…

  • Canterbury District Health Board campaign increasing in public prominence

    This post is a followup to the last two posts we wrote which were also relevant to this subject. Our post of 18th August referred specifically to the relevance of proposed health sector reforms to the overall direction of government policy, and yesterday’s one was about the need to ensure that elected representation is maintained…