DHBs budget $26 million for Holidays Act

It will cost District Health Boards at least $26 million to comply with Labour’s controversial Holidays Act, says National’s Health spokeswoman Judith Collins.

Ms Collins is releasing the first official figures from the DHBs today.

She says $26 million is just the tip of the iceberg, as the true cost of the Holidays Act hasn’t been fully calculated by DHBs. The cost of the extra week’s annual leave, which comes into force from 2007, will balloon the bill even further.

“It’s a bill many DHBs can’t afford to pay.”

Ms Collins says the Government’s political back-scratching of the unions is threatening hospital services.

“Surely DHBs should be spending their money on treating patients instead of subsidising the Government’s union payback.

“In a desperate bid to cover up the costs by the Government, the Ministry of Health told DHBs to send the Ministry their figures so the Ministry could ‘reconcile the responses’ before publicly releasing the information.

The Hawke’s Bay DHB, under pressure from the Ministry, suggested the Ministry tweak its numbers if they didn’t suit, saying that ‘if anything looks out of line with other DHBs feel free to adjust the figures’.

“If that’s not an example of putting politics before patients, I don’t know what is,” says Ms Collins.

© Scoop Media

Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>