Dear Editor, More detail is required on where the marine mining windfall money will be spent.

I think a better case should have been made by the Government in explaining specifically, and in detail, where the windfall money from marine mining will be spent. The report could be set out showing where the money will be spent relative to the income earned from the mining in a graduated scale, say $100 million, $200m, $300m per annum, etc.

History has taught us to be cautious when governments have large amounts of money to spend so it is important to be able to clearly see where the country’s money is being spent.

During the past week, I was in Hospital and able to see firsthand where certainly some of this money needs to be spent. The nurses working in the ward where patients are kept pre and post operation are working 12-hour shifts. This same ward is used as an overflow from the one room currently available for IHC patients, so during part of the week I was there, an IHC patient was constantly ringing the call button and calling out day and night “Anyone there. Help Me”.

I am certainly not blaming this poor lady and it was personally not an issue for me but for nurses working 12-hour shifts this was an issue – where accuracy in medicines being given out and treatments is important. Also, the Orometua visiting the hospital for his evening sermons had to compete with cries for help from this IHC patient.

If a complete breakdown of the costs on how much money would be required to solve these above problems, this would certainly add weight to convincing people to accept some scale of marine mining. This is just one small area of the current health department, so the same exercise could be repeated to cover all areas of the health department.

An emphasis should be placed on frontline staff to see they are adequately manned and correctly paid. Nobody likes to work shift work, so pay them well.

The proposed new salaries to be paid should be available for public viewing and a suitably qualified small panel should be able to comment.

A similar review should be conducted on the Police and also the Education department.

The Police in particular need a good upgrading and a lot of this upgrading can be handled by local retired police who can oversee changes to suit our local policing conditions. We don’t need to slavishly follow “What the Police do in NZ”. The planned increase in village policing should also be a very positive move, our Police need to gain their respect back from the public and be respected in their jobs.

Policing is another shift work job so again the frontline police need to be well paid.

Education is very important but not as demanding as the other frontline policing or health jobs.

To be 100 per cent transparent, one of the marine mining companies’ plans to be a tenant in my new building, however, this has been a work in progress for the past nine months and the hospital issues happened just a couple of weeks ago and this is the sole motivation for my comments above.

I don’t have any knowledge at all on the dangerous aspects of (seabed) mining when or if it takes place but I would be interested to hear about the effects resulting from underwater eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis – how do these compare to the proposed mining? Presumably it will be relative to the scale of the mining?

Regards,

Don Carlaw