converser.nz

  • 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…

  • Local / Democratic Representation Important In Government Services

    Last time we talked about the Government’s “centralist authoritarian path” as described by Dr Ian Powell, former head of the senior doctors’ union ASMS, in the context of funding challenges at Canterbury District Health Board. As we know, in the year 2000, the Government set up the 20 District Health Boards to run local health…

  • General computing update – week 34, 2020.

     Since writing early July about about the need to replace the disks in mainpc I have finally progressed towards this stage by purchasing the first of two disks. As noted in the earlier post, this was prompted by an I/O failure of one of the disks that resulted in it dropping out of the RAID…

  • Serious Health Sector Questions Raised By CDHB Funding Debacle

    In the news for the last few weeks has been the debacle over CDHB’s deficit. The issue is driven by underfunding of CDHB in recent years, and questions are due as to why the present Government has failed to address this matter, despite expectations. In fact, there is a much greater picture brewing over government…

  • A Tale Of Two Electricities

    This post is about electricity and how the Government has taken a cavalier approach to it in the last 30 years or so in NZ. Firstly in electrical safety, and secondly in the provision of electricity at a cost that people can afford. So let’s look at electrical safety. We can remember Consumer magazine reporting…

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