Darth Boomer

On Saturday, Andrea Vance at The Post ran a big story pushing Labour's claim that National isn't hiring nurses. What she didn't tell her readers is that the facts and figures she had before she published said the exact opposite. So here are the numbers The Post had in its hands and decided readers were better off not seeing. When Labour left office, there were 2,632 nursing vacancies. Just two years later under National, there were 1,344. That is 1,288 fewer empty positions, a reduction of nearly 50%. The nurse workforce has grown from 31,739 to 35,342. More nurses are on the wards, fewer are walking out the door, and there is no hiring freeze. And the party shouting loudest about it today – the Labour Party – is the very party that owned every one of those worse numbers. They left the vacancy problem nearly twice as bad as it is now, and here they are calling the clean-up a scandal. You could not make it up. Then there is Labour's favourite line of the whole story, that the Government "saved" $200 million by deliberately leaving health jobs empty. It sounds shocking, until you find out what that money actually was. It was money already set aside to pay nurses and doctors the moment their new pay deals were signed. The deals had not been signed, so the money had not gone out the door. It was not saved and it was not pocketed. It was sitting there waiting to be paid, exactly as planned. Calling that a "saving" is like pocketing an unpaid invoice. The money is committed, it just hasn't left the account yet. We spelled all of this out for Andrea Vance before she published. She published Labour's disinformation anyway. Then look at what Andrea Vance reported. Labour's framing led the story, right there in the headline where every reader's eye lands. The figures showing things are better under National, the ones handed over in writing, were left out altogether. That cannot have been an accident. That was a choice. Let me be clear about one thing. There are still vacancies to fill, and we even pointed Andrea Vance to my Letter of Expectations directing Health New Zealand to move faster to fill them. But leaving out the improvement and telling readers things are going backwards is not balanced reporting. It is the version Labour is selling, and The Post chose to run it. New Zealanders deserve to know the healthcare system is improving. What they do not deserve is a scare story the facts do not support. Facts The Post had in front of it the whole time.