Despite claims from ACT’s Richard Prebble, the Alliance’s Hospital Plan ensures Wellington Hospital will not be downsized. It won’t be 150 beds short. It will be full sized and it will have full tertiary services. It will be publicly financed and owned and it will stay in Newtown.

“We’ll have the hospital Wellington really needs in Wellington,” says Alliance Health Spokesperson Phillida Bunkle.

“Mr Prebble’s hospital is fraudulent. It is an under cover plan to promote Mr Prebble’s view that all hospital services should be privately owned.”

“The hospital Prebble is promoting won’t be public at all. It is part of Prebble’s agenda of privatisation which he so vigorously supports. The current proposal avoids discussing funding at all.”

The Government has offered no discussion of funding at all, no indication of the costs involved or where the money is coming from. There’s no money in the budget for hospital capital works. Indeed the government’s budget shows a $110 million reduction in capital expenditure for hospitals next year.

“Just like the Auckland hospital, which is an election bribe, there is no money allocated to build the new hospital. To be sure Act want to take the public out of public health.”

The Alliance Hospital Plan not only ensures a full, hi tech tertiary service in Wellington with the high tech services nationally funded. But we will also provide a full general hospital at Kenepuru for the people of Porirua and Kapiti Coast.

“Communities should not be pitted against each other for political mileage. All the people of the Wellington region deserve full hospital services. The Alliance has put forward in its Hospital Plan the only detailed, fully costed plan of how they will get them.”

“Only the Alliance is committed to full public hospitals at Kenepuru, Hutt and Wellington,” says Phillida Bunkle.

© 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>>