Our Government claims there is overspending in many government departments but I’m not sure that’s the reality. Instead, I believe there is a deficit in funding for health, housing, police and most other government departments, with the new Ministry for Regulation and spy agencies being the exception. 

It seems an ideological choice was made for unaffordable tax cuts, roads, landlords, tobacco companies and other favoured groups who give party donations, while not meeting the needs of most of the people. 

People have died because they haven’t been able to access healthcare due to short-staffing and underfunding. People will do without homecare, suffer pain, go hungry or homeless unnecessarily. 

There is a consequence in restricting staff wages and sacking good public service staff to save money. 

There is a consequence to cutting or stopping funding for social and volunteer agencies like food banks and disability care. 

Remember the claim that “No front line staff or services will be affected”? That seems to be far from the reality. 

Many of our best and brightest have gone offshore because our government is unwilling to pay decent incomes to provide them the lives they deserve, but which other countries are happy to give them. 

I was so proud when Labour lifted the wages of nurses and others, but very disappointed that our current government have frozen wages or given very minimal pay increases. 

That isn’t how you should act in a global employment market; 131,200 people departed New Zealand in the year ended June 2024. 

We couldn’t afford tax cuts, especially as most of us got just a couple of dollars, yet costs have risen much more for bus fares, rates, insurance, vehicle registrations - with ACC levies and RUCs soon to be increased. 

It has only taken 10 months for our government to take us back to 2017 - to be back on the same cruel track as the previous National government, with preference given to landlords and the wealthy instead of all New Zealanders. 

Public services are failing to fill our needs because our government has made senseless ideological choices. It’s simply not good enough.  

Mary-Ann de Kort