Philippa Branthwaite

East Coast MP Dana Kirkpatrick is trying to put a petition together to put pressure on Te Whatu Ora to reinstate the women’s services at Whakatāne Hospital. This is a farce.

She is deliberately forgetting one thing. She is part of the Government. The National Party, Act and NZ First made the funding decisions that put financial pressure on Te Whatu Ora and force it to make do with less.

You don’t need to go through the public relations exercise of setting up a ridiculous petition; just fund health better and stop making cuts to Te Whatu Ora and instructing Lester Levy to insist on cuts.

Don’t act as if you are the opposition, or you are Pontius Pilot and wash your hands of it – “I didn’t know”.

You do know about the funding and the effects of that on health. Every day we hear stories of cuts to services.

This is just another one of these stories but is striking close to home, and perhaps too close to home for Ms Kirkpatrick.