Skilled workers
Michael Wood’s inane response when asked about the shortage of nurses is the putrid icing on the decomposing immigration cake. The muppets seem to be continually out of step with the population they supposedly serve. Like many Western countries that have found it more convenient to transform themselves into highly paid service economies, NZ is dependent on lower paid immigrants to do the grunt work cleaning up our rubbish and supplying us with food.
Nurses are certainly not in the low paid cohort but they are a damned sight more essential than the Wiggles or a programmer that knows how to develop games that you can play on a computer in your bedroom. Mr Wood must have some new footy boots which he is showing off by kicking yet another can down the road.
To think that he is keeping an eye on, and constantly reviewing the nursing crisis brings me no comfort at all.
It is in plain sight, commented on negatively every day and is causing the medical world to run more and more inefficiently as key staff are missing in action.
You can see and feel the exasperation that interviewers are feeling when they try to question him on the subject. At the speed this bunch of muppets make decisions probably means a few hospitals are going to have to shut their doors to new patients because of the lack of ‘‘essential’’ staff before the cabinet stops discussing billion dollar shovel ready projects and starts getting on with discussing the immediate needs of the country.
Dr Dolittle’s health reforms may well be torpedoed by this brainless immigration setting. A skilled worker often has many secondary skills. Who cares if an immigrant comes in as a nurse and ends up as a manager. We are obviously short of both. A worker who looks after a group of horticultural workers in a hothouse or milks 500 cows twice a day may not be seen as skilled but they are doing a job that few others could do. Surely that must mean that they are ‘‘skilled’’. It just depends on the meaning that you attach to the word.
Geoff Orchard, Ohaupo