A co-ordinated South Auckland health strategy is urgently needed to tackle the underlying causes of poor health in the region, Labour health spokesperson Annette King said today.

"The Government can't continue to treat South Auckland, with its huge problems, as it does more affluent and healthy areas. Nowhere else is the different approach of National and Labour to public health care so starkly demonstrated.

"National's approach focuses on how many procedures a hospital carries out. It has failed to shift resources to tackle the causes of poor health - poverty, inadequate housing, a lack of education and employment opportunities, unhealthy environments and gaps in primary health care.

"South Auckland does not have enough GPs or health clinics. Manukau City has 196 GPs serving a population of 277,000. That's a rate of 71 per 100,000 people. Auckland City has 407 GPs looking after 378,000 people - a rate of 107 per 100,000. (NZ Medical Council May 99).

"The Government has long been warned about the growing rate of diseases of poverty in South Auckland, like meningococcal disease and respiratory infections. It has twiddled its thumbs since receiving proposals from Middlemore Hospital to co-ordinate a primary health strategy. While it procrastinates, the children of South Auckland are suffering in Third World conditions.

"Labour will re-establish the Public Health Goals that National abolished. Resources will go to primary healthcare providers who will be expected to meet these goals, such as improving immunisation rates and reducing rates of asthma and smoking. Labour is committed to integrated care and early intervention.

"The South Auckland crisis highlights the failure of National's market-driven health experiment," Annette King said.

"The health of South Auckland children has fallen to a "critical level of unacceptability". So has the performance of the Government. Its members should be hanging their heads in shame."

© 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>>