Will anyone address the elephant in the room? asks columnist Ruth Mave. And will government tax pensioners again? Mave writes.

Having ‘a memory like an elephant’ means you can easily remember events places and people for years even a decade. Goldfish however, have been falsely described as having fleeting memories of 3 seconds, when they can actually remember things up to five months.

In our political voting pool, it is fair to say over the past decade or more we have displayed more tendencies to look more like elephants but with a goldfish memory at best.

Elections every four years allows goldfish memories to fade on the most pressing and damaging of decisions made by the current government, so that voters will once more believe the campaigns and marketing of politicians, whose self-rewarding decisions such as seabed mineral mining, water tariffs, and passports can be pushed ahead of caring for the elderly.

Voters are in it for the short-term gain not the long-term legacy. Gone are the people who would gladly work to plant an acorn today, and look after and nurture it to grow into a full mature oak tree they will never live to see or sit under and benefit from its shade. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children in the third or fourth generation but what do we care – we won’t be here.

In the animal world we should be more like the wolf. They look after their elderly with respect and care. The younger members protect and feed them.

Recently, Mark Brown has said government provides funding to support families in caring for elderly people at home, despite the challenges faced by many families in providing 24-hour care.  Basically, they fund household improvements for toilets and bedrooms. That’s it. A couple of bar handrails then you the family do the rest.

No mention of plans to build rest home care facilities, or implement free home care nursing visits from the health ministry. He did say for elderly. “For the most of the history of our country that care is provided by the family and it continues to this day because we do not have a facility that looks after our aged people for geriatric care. As a country that has developed and grown over the years, we have had to build and establish needs that previously we did not have in our country.” So, why has he not built them?

One of those elephant moments-in-time, long forgotten by goldfish but is still plaguing and affecting our elderly, was the 2013 introduction of taxing the Cook Island pension, where Brown as Finance Minister was fully responsible.

To this day our elderly are struggling to not just deal with being taxed but to service and repay the two years back tax that was imposed on them at the introduction of the tax. This was a tax no one saw coming. CIP did not declare it in their election campaign of 2011 and quite unbelievably it was upheld and maintained despite the elderly taking to the streets to march, chant and protest. They even went to the lengths of raiding the pensioners bank accounts a week before Christmas and stealing their money, without any legal recriminations of their blatant criminal action. They did it once, they could do it again.

Why has this pensioner tax not been used to build their necessary infrastructure?  Where have the millions we have received for infrastructure funding from New Zealand and Saudi Arabia gone? Work towards a multi-million construction of government buildings out the back of the Banana Court continues silently, out of sight out of mind. The goldfish swim in their bowl.

In 2017 government found they were owed 36million in tax debt of which 12million was written off.  Brown declined to divulge the names of the MPs who benefitted from the tax amnesty. October 2018 Brown gave his political friends a 45 percent pay rise after declining a six percent wage rise for police and teachers. 2019 he gave pensioners a one off payment of $400 for covid. In other words Mark Brown was prepared to tax his elderly mother while overpaying himself and his friends. Brown does not subscribe to, when life blesses you financially, don’t raise your standards of living, raise your standards of giving.

A headline recently said. “Health minister becomes first female to chair WHO meeting.” The acceptance letter said. “Your dedication to improving the health of your people is truly inspiring” The headline should have read. “WHO is the female health minister?” It is not our goldfish memory at fault here, it is because we have not heard any public communication from her, since before Covid.  Not during the pandemic, measles outbreak or even after WHO voted us as number one in childhood obesity in the world. I wonder if anyone in the meeting will address that ‘elephant in the room?’