Bob Edlin: How Simeon Brown stonewalled Parliamentary questions about nurse numbers....

....and triumphed in not saying “54

The “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams was “42”. It was calculated by a supercomputer named Deep Thought over 7.5 million years.

The answer to a question in Parliament this week was “54”. But it looked like we might have to wait 7.5 million years before Health Minister Simeon Brown would let that number trip from his tongue.

The question was raised by Labour’s Ayesha Verrall, who asked Brown:

Bob Edlin: Verrall should forget about a digital health promise being broken (it wasn’t)....

Verrall should forget about a digital health promise being broken (it wasn’t) and focus on how well $164.6m is being spent

Opposition health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall needs to be concerned more about what taxpayers are getting for the government’s health spending than with trying to spotlight the breaking of promises that were not made.

Bob Edlin: Information security at Health NZ.....

Information security at Health NZ – is there a need for someone dedicated to protecting primary care data?

The question of whether Health New Zealand should have a Chief Information Security Officer dedicated to primary health is well worth considering, in the aftermath of the leak of personal health data held (not too securely) by ManageMyHealth.

“Dedicated to primary health” are the key words in this proposition.

Bob Edlin: Is it modesty?.....

Is it modesty? Brown is coy when asked what he expected after funds and jobs were bled from Health NZ’s IT projects

When $330 million in funding was lopped from Health New Zealand digital work along with 400 staff and more than 132 IT projects – what did the Minister think would happen?

John McLean: Verrall in peril?

Labour Party Member of Parliament Ayesha Verrall has accused Health Commissioner Lester Levy of corruptly inflating the size of Health New Zealand’s financial deficit, and of having a “reputation for cooking the books”. Essentially, she’s falsely accusing Levy of being a crook.

Verrall made her accusations at a Parliamentary Health Select Committee hearing on 3 December 2024, as Labour’s shadow Health Cabinet Minister.

JC: Where There Is Smoke There Is Fire

The whole thing stinks on a number of levels.

And so it has proven: the Labour Party continues to hide or obfuscate the truth or quite simply just tell porkies. These people continuously back up my previous description where I used the words ‘low-level intelligentsia’. They continue to display the same behaviour that got them thrown out of office. It appears they are either very slow learners or think they can get away with it. Probably both.

David Farrar: The non-disclosure to the Minister

Radio NZ reports:

The Ministry of Health has not won itself many friends this week with its failure to inform minister Casey Costello that one of its staffers is related to her arch-rival in Parliament.

Costello has every right to feel aggrieved.

For months, she has been working with health officials on tobacco reform policy, all the while, unbeknownst to her, one of them was the sister-in-law of Labour’s Ayesha Verrall.

Cam Slater: Labour’s Law Vaporises Millions of Dollars

The Ministry of Health and an incompetent minister may very well have cost the taxpayer millions as well as put the China FTA at risk.

Following the 2020 election Labour looked at new policies to bring into the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act (SERPA) to fix what they saw as some outstanding issues with the Act.

Cam Slater: Is Ayesha Verrall Lying or Stupid?

It seems to have escaped the notice of Ayesha Verrall that Labour has lost the election. She has been throwing a paddy, stamping her feet and huffing on about changes to smoking legislation. As a result of her hyperbolic ranting, she has made a very, very bold claim: that decisions around “smoking” usually have bipartisan consensus.

Point of Order: Here’s how Ayesha Verrall explained the spending (less than $1m so far).....

..... of $27.45m for crisis mental health services

Health Minister Ayesha Verrall demonstrated she has become a dab hand at ducking being needled at Question Time, when she was pressed to explain what has happened to many millions appropriated for mental health services in last year’s Budget.

In Parliament this week, she was questioned only about one chunk of the funding – a $27.45 million portion – and about why less than $1 million of this has actually been spent on the services it was intended to provide.

National’s Matt Doocey asked her: