Island Life by David Slack

This is the week my Dad didn't have a stroke.

Say what you like about this nanny state, our family is grateful that he had to get a medical check-up to keep his driver's licence once he turned 80, we're grateful that his GP noticed that his left carotid artery was almost completely occluded and we're grateful that in the space of just a few weeks, the health system was able to assess him, operate successfully and send him home in perfect shape.

Turns out it was in the nick of time. He'd had symptoms - but stoically said nothing about them in the week preceding his scheduled procedure - which proved to have been mini-strokes. You can read here about the imminent risk he was dicing with.

They operated on Wednesday. There's a five per cent risk of stroke while you're on the table for this procedure so we had a few tense hours, but as anxious waits in hospitals go, you can do much worse.

All of this took place in the shiny new Auckland Hospital, and it was my first visit to the place. What a shambles. Nothing works, you can't find your way around, staff are unhelpful and surly and the overwhelming sense you get is of barely controlled chaos. As if. You could usefully apply aspects of that description to your typical Westfield mall, but from what I saw, you can't attach any of it to Auckland Hospital. It's a huge enterprise and it all functions with an efficiency and capability that is quite impressive.

I don't doubt that other people will have stories of frustration and exasperation to tell you about their encounters with the health system, but my family really can't offer you any. My experience years ago with coronary care was all good, Dad's treatment this week couldn't have been better, and my sister probably has Wellington Hospital to thank for still being here today after her first rocky experience of childbirth and a too-close encounter with meningitis.

It would be wrong to offer any kind of Pollyanna assessment of the health system on the basis of this anecdotal experience, but equally, it's worth bearing in mind that anecdotal evidence about the failings of the health system doesn't necessarily prove that a system is in disarray.

Of course, even if it's not in any form of disarray, that's not to say there might not be problems of a different character besetting the health system. Don Brash has made much of the proposition that Labour has lifted annual health spending from $6.1 billion to $9.7 billion over the past six years, but that the number of operations has barely increased during that time.

"Under Labour", he charges, a vast increase in new spending, but little increase in output, "is what can only be described as a collapse in productivity."

Could this be a real problem? Is health a black hole of spending? Where is all the money going?

It's an impossibly complex entity to analyse. You can come to persuasive conclusions both favourable and unfavourable, depending on your particular agenda.

What to do? Turn to experts in the field? Perhaps, but of course, they may not be without their agendas either.

Nevertheless, Ian Powell of the Salaried Medical Specialists Association made a contribution on the point this week that seems worth considering. He said that the figures might suggest that there's been little increase in output, but that's because Treasury productivity data only covers inpatient discharges, and that, he says, only picks up a part of what public hospitals do.

It does not include many hospital activities such as outpatient clinics, ongoing treatment of many chronic illnesses and community health initiatives. Much of the work done by physicians, paediatricians, psychiatrists, radiologists and pathologists is not picked up by this data.

And there's more: it also leaves out the work that GPs are now doing that was previously done by the public hospitals, thanks to the changes that have been made in primary care.

Feeling a bit less cheated now?

It's hard to ever come to firm conclusions over the conflicting arguments about the way we spend our health budget. It's vast: 20 cents in every tax dollar goes to health - that's as good as ten billion dollars, and you could take that rate up to 40 cents and there would still be people who would miss out, because that's the nature of the thing: there's always more you can do.

In the very simplest terms, we want to be sure we're doing as much as we can afford, and that we're being as efficient about it as we can possibly be. Because it's just about impossible to prove that categorically one way or the other, you can always have an argument about it.

The one thing I think you can say with confidence is that at a certain point, if you tighten the settings up too much, the cries of frustration will drown out all else, and towards the end of the 1990s, we seemed to be in that state. We don't seem to be there today.

Some entertaining entries already for the Sunday Star Time headline contest, thank you very much. I especially like: Helen Clark plants GM corn in own backyard, and the heroic: Don Brash caught in compromising position with Donkey- National leads polls still .

There's still time, if you have one to suggest. To recap: a copy of Civil War and Other Optimistic Predictions to the person who can most accurately predict this Sunday's front page headline in the Sunday Star Times.

Meanwhile, with a big tip of the hat to Sunnyo, here's another contest that just suggested itself, really.

I thought,
perhaps,
a haiku.

Another copy of the book to the best haiku in response to these pictures of the National Party's Wellington Central candidate and campaign manager both out and about and pressing the flesh.

If the viewing of these images brings forth some aspect of spirituality and provokes an emotional response within you, then do by all means compose three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively and just hit the old reply button.

And then a serious post tomorrow. Promise.

1. Please read the following statement:

You need to be sloppy, soft and wet - i.e. open up the cheque book, as excruciating as this will feel. There is a large government surplus and the real result will be determined by who the public thinks is best to spend it. Soft centre voters are inherently self interested and will vote according to what they can get out of you. Election winning behaviour requires you to slosh those funds around and buy your way to the Treasury benches.

Does Bryan Sinclair have a future in:

A: hot and heavy erotic paperbacks?
B: a regulation-averse telco?
C: no further New Zealand political campaigns?
D: Melbourne?

2. Speaking of Melbourne, is there a Holden dealership in Caulfield, and if so, does it have a clever name?

3. For that matter, if you had a business halfway down Dominion Road, would you take the opportunity to give it a witty handle?

4. Was anyone there to hear Don Brash's speech in Whangarei last Monday? Did he deliver the speech as distributed, or did he correct this passage to sound less as though it was written by someone who knows a lot more about corporate culture than he does about recent Treaty issues?

And recently the Environment Court determined that Genesis Power can divert water from the Whanganui River, but only for the next 10 years instead of the 35 years it had sought to ensure security of supply. Environment Court Judge Gordon Whiting said in the decision: "To the Maori people, the severing of the headquarters of their rivers is a sacrilege resulting in the denigration of Maori values and beliefs affecting their self esteem."

5. Please compare these two photos:

One of these people is a virulent critic of Don Brash, the other is a cabinet minister. Which is which?

6. And finally, this one has a prize: a copy of Civil War and Other Optimistic Predictions by David Slack (Penguin, 28.00) to the person who can most accurately predict this Sunday's front page headline in the Sunday Star Times. The reply button's just below.

Can we take it from the latest poll result that 46% of New Zealanders number themselves in the mainstream? Maybe.

It would be astonishing if National could pull off an MMP election victory by campaigning as though it were still working under First Past the Post conditions, but remarkably, it's not far off achieving it on the basis of this poll. If Peters loses and NZ first fails to get the threshold, then that poll result is enough to give National all but two of the seats it needs to govern outright. Peter Dunne, come on DOWN.

Gordon King might yet get his perfect storm. We'll see. Centrebet still gives it to Labour at $1.55 against $2.25. That's a big change from a week ago, but still some distance from the $1.85 opening odds they posted for both parties. They say at Centrebet that the big punters wait until every possible event in the campaign has worked its way through the system, and then the big money goes on.

They also say that they frame their odds with a couple of factors weighing quite strongly: on the one hand, countries with an MMP electoral system tend to produce centre left coalitions more than centre right ones. On the other hand, they're mindful that all governments expire over time and that the odds of achieving a third term are always a bit longer.

The guy I spoke to at Centrebet about all this seemed especially interested in the possibility that one or the other party still has a big shot or two left to fire off. He was hugely impressed by the way Howard held fire on their logging policy until the very last, then went in and mowed down Labour. I think he's convinced something like that will happen here. We'll see.

So: maybe a change of government, maybe not. What is undeniably clear is that a party that was being prodded for signs of life after its election drubbing three years ago is back with a vengeance, and now might be as good a time as any to ask: is this is a government-in-waiting or a bunch of politicians singing along to a marketing campaign that recites a list of focus group grievances? Is National ready for prime time?

If you click over to their website, your impression at first blush might be that there is a substantial body of policy locked and loaded. First hundred days, here we come. But when you start fossicking around the news releases and speeches, you might become a little perturbed at a recurring theme. There is a sameness to many of the policy speeches, (with the odd exception, such as Bill English's more substantial work on education), and that sameness is this:
Express outrage and frustration, typically by fixating upon exceptional and marginal aspects of an issue (Taniwha in road construction for example).
Give the political correctness gone mad horn a blast.
Wave the that's not in the interests of mainstream New Zealanders flag a bit.
Then promise that when you're in office, things will be different.Very different.
How different? Well, er, we'll review it.

Take health: money has been wasted, they say. Too many bureaucrats and administrative bodies they say. That has to change, but it must not change much, lest we cause disruption. So we'll REVIEW THINGS.

Or take the RMA. It's a mess, and they'll fix it by...REVIEWING IT.

Well, no actually, that's a bit of a misrepresentation. They do have some specific measures in mind for that. For example, they'll strip out references to the Treaty and obligations to consult Maori.

That goes down a treat in the focus groups, no doubt, but it ignores some important historical lessons. The design of the Resource Management Act was influenced by tribunal decisions such as Motonui which had shown quite clearly that there were aspects of the environment that were very important to Maori. You don't run a sewerage outfall onto their traditional fishing grounds. You don't go developing on top of sacred burial grounds. You should make due allowance for the cultural values of the iwi who signed the treaty. It makes good common sense to talk to them and find out that whatever you're doing does no harm of that kind.

But the focus groups have spoken, so out she goes.

Speech after speech, more of the same: this is bad, and we will..REVIEW IT

What about economic policy? It seems to reduce to a pretty simple nostrum: bureaucrats bad, private enterprise good.

I don't doubt the sincere motivation of Dr Brash and his team to try to do what's best for us all, but from where I sit, the government in waiting appears to be offering itself for office on too flimsy a basis: too many simple solutions to complex problems, too little evidence of carefully prepared, detailed policy.

Why? In part because the leader's CEO style has left the caucus unable to resolve policy positions on crucial matters such as welfare, and in part because this leader is as entranced by the notion of a hands-off government as much as every other right-leaning Nat has been from Williamson and Luxton through to Shipley and Richardson. They love the idea of market signals and simple magic bullets, and no doubt they have boundless faith in the market to deliver us to the promised land.

It all sounds very nice but if you look across the Pacific to their ideological fellow traveller and the mess he's dealing with in - oh let's just pick two: - Iraq and Louisiana, you wonder whether we might just want to be careful what we wish for.

Hey Farrar! Who are you calling a chick? Poor old Che must have nearly choked on his granola when he read on Kiwiblog this morning that "she" had written a message for Labour supporters in Tauranga and that "her" rationale was: "it's bye bye Whinny while helping the commies get back into power."

Subsequently standing corrected by Che, Mr Farrar asked - and not at all petulantly - why we didn't have pictures of ourselves upon this site. Well talk about sprung. A picture paints a thousand words. Read them and weep.

Russell Brown


Coy and somewhat timorous, Brown is something of a homebody, rarely venturing out of her Parnell apartment after dark. Nonetheless, she is one of the boldest and hardest working women in New Zealand's media. Her blogging is fearsomely prodigious. Most mornings she will, as David Cohen recently remarked, have produced a penetrating analysis of the events of the past 24 hours and their pertinence to the zeitgeist while most weary journalists are still hunched over their first Panadol and latte.

Damian Christie



… has been described as the Anna Nicole Smith of Te Atatu. The pneumatic Christie is no stranger to notoriety, appearing often in cryptic allusions in Bridget Saunders' columns. Often-married, she was the subject of a scandalous divorce in 1995, involving a rubber chicken suit and a sparrow sexer; a subject to which she frequently returns in her often lurid blogs.

Jolisa Gracewood



...is the most enigmatic of the Public Address bloggers. He was placed by the witness protection programme in deep cover in Connecticut as the East Coast's brainiest soccer mom, teaching writing at Yale and sharing a house with an astrophysicist and an astonishingly talented three year old. His former life as a Florida mob boss is never mentioned in his writing.

David Slack



… runs a haven for stray animals in Birkenhead where she has lived in seclusion since the acclaim that attended her Nobel Prize for Physics in 2002.

Fiona Rae



…is being tipped as the man to succeed Ralph Norris at Air New Zealand. One of only a few people to successfully make the transition from running a rural cartage company to the intensely political world of airline management, his insights into cattle-class management are widely considered to have been pivotal in achieving the national carrier's financial recovery. A frequent flyer, he blogs infrequently.

Che Tibby



... is quite literally the glamour model of the Public Address crew. Her winsome looks and towering frame, accented as it is by her exotic downy facial hair have made her the face of the new decade, capturing the innocence of Marc Ellis and the tortured longing of All Black captain Mandy Barker in that famous image as he looks on from the sinbin in the Rugby World Cup final.

Graham Reid



... is widely regarded as the woman who saved country music from itself. The title of Reid's latest album, "55-Holden Wheels On A Gravel Road," could very well describe her voice as well. Rich and crunchy and resonant, without sacrificing beauty or control, Graham at the microphone is clearly not of the Mariah Carey school of showboat vocal acrobatics. Her blogging is just as crunchy.

Tze Ming Mok



... is a Taihape shearer who has come only recently to blogging after a prolonged Kerouac-esque odyssey up and down the Australian eastern seaboard. Late last year he won a laptop with a wireless broadband connection in a poker game at the Maroochydore bowling club. He famously entered the blogging world when he miskeyed a Google search for "public bogs."

Keith Ng



... is a striking Swedish au pair who blogs from the Mexican consulate in Mumbai. She takes whatever opportunity she can to exercise her lithe limbs in the lavishly-appointed gymnasium. However the dual commitments of nannying for five demanding children and blogging on the nuances of the New Zealand election from such a far remove leave her feeling, she confesses, "so terribly tired. I wish mostly to be alone."