Kia ora John,

New Zealanders need and deserve a strong public health system. Throughout the country, we need to ensure hospitals, clinics and community providers have the resources needed to provide the best level of care.

Rather than prioritising this in Budget ‘24, the National Government has decided to allocate barely enough healthcare funding to keep the lights on.

You'll pay more to visit a doctor because government funding for GPs isn't keeping up with inflation. Medicines will also be more expensive because the Government has scaled back Labour’s free prescription initiative. 

The Budget is full of broken health promises. As well as leaving cancer patients anxiously waiting to find out about treatment funding, National has backtracked on a raft of other campaign commitments.

• National has dialled back their commitment to increase medical school placements by 50, providing little for our stretched workforce
• They also promised to deliver a new medical school, but this went unfunded
• National promised pay parity for nurses, and to support nurses and midwives with student loan repayments, but this is now up in the air
• They promised to increase the number of doctors specialising in psychiatry, and double the number of trainee psychologists, but have no plan to achieve this

Back-office roles are being cut, meaning clinicians have less time to care for patients because they’re doing admin. Some frontline vacancies are going unfilled or are being disestablished. The New Zealand Nurses Organisation is concerned that the full number of nursing students won’t be recruited to public hospitals this year, meaning locally trained nurses will seek opportunities overseas. This will pile pressure onto already stretched healthcare workers and increase wait times.

Fixing our health system is a complex job, but National chooses to ignore good scientific advice about how to do it. Instead, they're repealing our world-leading anti-smoking laws, making school lunches less nutritious, and disestablishing Te Aka Whai Ora – our Māori Health Authority – which was established to improve health outcomes for Māori.

In Government, Labour delivered historic increases in pay for nurses and made both doctor’s visits and prescriptions more affordable. Labour also doubled minimum sick leave to protect workers and businesses and boosted funding for ambulances and paramedics.

The Government needs to commit to real solutions and meaningful investment in our healthcare system and its workers. When it comes to their health and wellbeing, New Zealanders deserve world-class care, not more broken promises.

Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall MP
Labour Health Spokesperson