I want to start by acknowledging nurses, health workers, and everyone holding the system together across the motu. This winter has been rough. We expect winter to put pressure on services, but this one has felt relentless. Influenza has moved through whānau, communities, and the workforce itself. People are turning up tired, shifts are short, and too many are carrying more than anyone should reasonably be asked to carry. I see that mahi, and I do not want it to be treated as just business as usual.
Over the past few months, I have spoken with many health workers and tauira across the motu. What I am hearing is consistent: people are tired, frustrated, and worried about where this is heading.
Health and nursing are back in the media because an election is getting closer. Suddenly everyone wants to talk about the state of the health system. And yes, we should be talking about it. The public should know what is happening. But nurses have been saying this for years. The crisis did not suddenly appear because it became useful in an election year. It has been building, while the people making decisions have picked the bits of nursing they want to talk about and ignored the rest. We are visible when it suits the politics. We are too often ignored when the real decisions are made.
The image of Carl Fratscher's experiment with the boiling frog keeps coming back to me. The heat does not go up all at once. It rises bit by bit, and every increase gets explained away as temporary, manageable, or just part of the job. That is what has happened in nursing. A bit more demand here. A bit less staffing there. Another winter surge. Another public statement that does not match what nurses are seeing. Another expectation that people will just keep coping. Before long, pressure becomes normal, and people stop recognising it as a crisis.
That is why the numbers matter. Ministers and officials have said there were 2100 more nurses employed over the past two years. But when you look at full-time contracts, the number is only 54. That is not a small gap. That is not a rounding issue. That changes the story being told to the public. If the workforce numbers are being presented in a way that does not match what nurses are living, then we are right to ask what else is being dressed up to make things look better than they are.
Nurses are telling a very different story from the one we are hearing in some political commentary. They are talking about a hard winter, influenza ripping through communities, staff off sick, gaps across shifts, and services being pushed right to the edge. That does not sit comfortably beside the claim that hospitals are managing well. The issue is not that nurses do not understand the system. The issue is that nurses understand it too well, because they are the ones holding it together.
And I keep asking myself, when does this end? Because it is not one thing. It is everything piling up at once. It is the attacks on the Nursing Council and cultural safety. It is physician assistants being introduced into a workforce already under pressure. It is pay equity. It is community and primary care being left to absorb the pressure. It is Hauora Māori providers and Māori health having to fight, again and again, for what should already be understood. It is tauira dealing with placement poverty and job insecurity before they have even started properly. It is mental health, corrections, rural health, and so many services being expected to make do with less while the need keeps growing.
And underneath all of this is something else we cannot ignore: racism is being allowed to creep back into places where it should have no place at all. We need to call that out. Cultural safety is not some optional extra. Māori health is not a side issue. Hauora Māori, equity, and safe care are not things that can be picked up or dropped depending on the politics of the day. They are central to whether people can trust the health system. When they are weakened, whānau pay the price.
We also have to talk about state and faith-based abuse. We cannot talk about health, safety, trust, and care without naming the harm done by institutions that were supposed to protect people. Children, whānau, disabled people, Māori, Pasifika, and vulnerable communities were harmed while systems looked after themselves. That history is not separate from the health system. So, when we are told to simply trust institutions to protect people, we have every right to ask: based on what? History shows us that institutions have not always protected those in their care. And right now, when numbers are being fudged, facts are being massaged, and uncomfortable truths are being avoided, trust is not being built. It is being damaged. It is part of the same conversation about power, racism, cultural safety, and who gets believed. Survivors need to be heard, redress needs to be real, and healing needs to be properly supported. Public services cannot be allowed to hide behind silence, denial, or paperwork ever again.
Like the frog in slowly boiling water, each new pressure is treated as something nurses, whānau, survivors, and communities should just absorb. But this is not normal. It is not inevitable. These are political choices. Choices about funding, staffing, pay, equity, redress, workforce planning, and who gets believed when systems cause harm. Nurses are not asking for applause while nothing changes. Survivors are not asking for sympathy instead of justice. We are asking for honesty. We are asking for accountability. We are asking for safe staffing, fair pay, meaningful redress, investment in Māori health, and respect for cultural safety. And we are asking for a health system that actually listens to the people holding it together every day. Anything less is not leadership. It is neglect, and we have carried the cost of that neglect for long enough.