Peter Minten

Last Friday, the Beacon showed again what a great local newspaper we have.

And we should cherish it because everywhere else in New Zealand, local newspapers are closing their doors. When you ask Gemini, Google’s AI Help, it comes up with 29 titles in total in 2025 until today.

The Beacon delivers nationwide issues such as the state of our health and care system, on our doorstep. Like last Friday with Kathy Forsyth reporting about ED staff shortages and Diane McCarthy about a road trip several prominent Grey Power members undertook to see the Minister of Health. And those are all on top of the issues we were already aware off: the reduction in maternity services at our hospital and the struggle of a local girl, Rachel Weatherly, to get a life-changing operation. The overall verdict is that the quality of our health and care system doesn’t match our aspiration of being a First World country and OECD member.

Also very encouraging is that the reporters were prepared to research for numbers and data. I have written in an opinion piece last June that the quality of governance depends on the appreciation of science and facts by our politicians. New Zealand needs clever politicians.

The article about ED staffing showed that the problems are a significant increase in patients, 25.5 percent over the past two years, and not enough senior doctors available for a 24/7 operation of the ED. That 25.5 percent increase shows that the reasons I summoned up in that article, too many traffic injuries, we live an unhealthy lifestyle aka a too-high body mass index as a nation and some more, are confirmed with data from the “floor”.

This strengthens my opinion that if we don’t address the real root causes behind the increase in demand for emergency care, we are only going further backwards with waitlists for elective surgeries because the emergency demand is occupying recovery beds.

And, according to the health minister, only private health organisations can deal with those. But there is absolutely no evidence that privatisation yields a benefit apart from the shareholders of those private health organisations. That was one of the reasons the Grey Power members undertook a road trip to see the minister and the circle is round again.

In the same Beacon, there was also an example of how a local newspaper can add an article to the nationwide press and feed the debate on certain issues. Ms McCarthy wrote about choppy progress our council made with its Climate Pathway. The setback was caused by the requirement to add 2917 ton carbon emissions because the council decided to fell a block of forestry at Valley Road. Apparently, nobody at the council’s office had realised that when you harvest a forest which is registered to the Emission Trading System (ETS), you have to surrender the carbon credits you received with growing the trees unless you replant like for like.

This could mean that the council must find money for those 2917 ton of carbon credit units to surrender them back to the government (the price for a carbon unit sits at $57/unit so council could be required to stump up to $166,000 to honour the surrendering requirement). This story is on the websites of RNZ as well as NZME (The New Zealand Herald) to emphasize that there are risks with registering your forests in the ETS. I guess whatever is required by the council it will be booked under unforeseen spending.

The Beacon is a great community asset and all the residents within Whakatāne should realise that.