Conceding a crisis may be clever

‘Crisis? What crisis?’’ According to political legend, that headline, in The Sun newspaper in 1979, sealed the fate of British prime minister James Callaghan.

It was the winter of discontent. Everyone from gravediggers to rubbish collectors had been on strike. Callaghan returned to a freezing Britain from a summit in the warm Caribbean and disputed the notion his country was in the grip of ‘‘mounting chaos’’. The headline followed. A general election four months later removed Callaghan and Labour from office, and installed Margaret Thatcher.

Newspaper nerds and history buffs might have been reminded of that scene this week when Health Minister Andrew Little stubbornly refused to use the word ‘‘crisis’’ to describe a stretched, challenged and embattled health system in the grip of a perfect storm of Covid-19, winter flu and unusually high workforce shortages.

As Little kept being asked to label it a crisis and kept resisting, while searching for less damning synonyms, interviews became farcical and started to detract from the seriousness of the problem.

Little claimed last month that our hospitals are under ‘‘very significant pressure’’ but are still coping. That annoyed many in the sector who feel he has downplayed the crisis, as they see it.

In an open letter to Little, the New Zealand Association of General Surgeons asked for ‘‘public acknowledgement of the gravity of the situation and the fact that this is not a temporary winter/flu/ Covid-related problem’’. The association had no hesitation in calling it a health workforce crisis. It also disputed Little’s suggestion that this is just an unusually bad winter, as that leads ‘‘the public to believe that the health workforce problem will self-resolve when the sun starts shining’’, and ‘‘we all know this isn’t the case’’.

Another open letter, from the New Zealand Women in Medicine Charitable Trust, agreed we are facing a crisis, and went further still. Its survey of more than 900 respondents in 30 sub-specialties found ‘‘we are at risk of a catastrophic collapse of the healthcare workforce’’.

The trust also said ‘‘the pandemic has exposed longstanding staffing issues, rather than being the cause’’.

This may offer a clue to Little’s reluctance to call it a crisis. If he was to agree with these bodies, he would have to accept their assessment of an under-resourced and demoralised workforce.

A coincidence of two viruses in winter can seem like an act of God, beyond any government’s control. But the deeper, structural problems underpinning the crisis cannot be shrugged off in the same way. There is also a way in which calling something a crisis is a political game. It is a red alert setting that gets everyone’s attention.

Oppositions will always try to embarrass governments into using the word rather than more palatable variations. Labour cannot complain about the current run of crisis-talk, given it claimed there were crises in both mental health and housing when it was last in opposition. Just for variety, Labour’s Phil Twyford also wanted to declare ‘‘a state of emergency’’ over housing. Then National prime minister John Key was unwilling to agree with Labour.

There is another way to respond. Rather than resisting or denying, a politician could accept the label and act accordingly. After a few days of hearing the Opposition talk about a cost-ofliving crisis in March, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern conceded and announced some temporary measures, including a petrol excise cut.

Agreeing with the Opposition, and the growing chorus in the media, took some sting out of the criticism. After all, it wasn’t just the winter of discontent that undid Callaghan in 1979. It was the sense that he was out of touch in his refusal to admit it.