Today's installment of "Defund, Destabilise, Privatise": 140 Nurse Practitioner candidates left hanging for months.

Money for taxcuts: Instantaneous and Plentiful ($16 Billion). Funding for a rural mental health nurse practitioner who will treat literally tens of thousands of patients in their career? Sorry, no $.

I've got to say something because I don't see the media picking up on this, and I think there’s a compelling public interest in people knowing, despite a government that repeatedly utters: ‘no hiring freeze, no frontline cuts, no impact on clincial services, we’re overstaffed with nurses, bloated and in need of cuts’ and other figments of their profit-fevered imagination.

Right now as I write this, 140 nurse practitioners have been left hanging. Normally their govt funding is guaranteed by July. But it's been several months of pleading and worrying, and still no word on government funding.

Leaving highly educated, highly trained, highly dedicated people hanging like this for months is dysfunctional. Uneconomical. Inefficient. Imprudent. Unwise.

75% of these nurse practitioners would’ve gone into community health or mental health. Their work is desperately needed. These are people with options elsewhere.

Virtually all of them have a job waiting for them in NZ, taking care of people like us.

If they graduate.

To graduate, they must complete this last year of a multi-year training program…

To complete that last year program administered via 6 universities, the government funding must come through..

It's THAT funding that has been frozen, leaving these NPs trapped in the pipeline.

[Bringing to mind a related story of international medical student graduates who also couldn’t get government to fund their house officer training roles, meaning literally dozens of doctors — available, and ready to work in our hospitals and primary care — were having to make plans elsewhere. Talk about looking a gift horse in mouth.]

And while this government moved with lightning speed to immediately give landlords $3 billion in tax benefits, and $16 billion for tax cuts that mostly target the well-off, getting funding to these absolutely essential public services is in the

“sorry, the money's gone” basket.

[N.B., if you're one of the approximately 50% of New Zealand workers that earns $30 an hour or less, you're looking at around a princely $12 a week in tax cuts. Classic Reverse Robinhood stuff; stealing from the poor to give to the rich. But if you give the poors 12 dollars a week, they’ve be glad and not even notice you just approved around $216 million for the cancer company Philip Morris.]

But I digress.

The point is we risk losing an entire chunk of an essential public workforce. This is just daft.

37 of these nurse practitioners are Rural. 20 are Maori/Pacifica. They would have treated tens of thousands of patients annually. Yet they've been frozen. And some will have to say no and move on with their lives and take other career paths or move abroad.

We are better than this. We can do better than this.

How the heck did we get conned by politicians that think public healthcare isn’t an essential public asset and investment, but should act like a profit-centre?

Simply reverse the landlord tax breaks and will be able to pay for these nurse practitioners, AND free public dental care for every single New Zealander. And more. Those tax breaks for landlords were MASSIVE. $2,900,000,000. 2.9 Billion.

There is no funding shortage: These were just bad choices this government has made (to the tune of 19 Billion dollars just for those two programmes) to help the wealthy groups they value the most.

For them it's simply business, but for the non-wealthy it's a matter of healthier lives: something more important than corporate profits and political campaign donations.

Who knows what tomorrow's headline story will be, under this Austerity government?

If you can get access to it via a GP friend, I’d recommend following the NZDoctor magazine, they're doing the best job in the country of chronicling the almost weekly defunding atrocities.

On Substack, MountainTui and Sapphi are also doing the investigative journalism which Corporate ad-funded media won't do.

We will need to work together, otherwise we'll just see more of this government's steamroller programme to “Defund, Destabilise, Fast-Track, and Privatise” essential public services in New Zealand. We’ve allowed them to have too much of a head start, but no longer.