Don’t attack Mike King – attack a Government underfunding mental health

By
Martyn Bradbury
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50
960

‘Unusual and inconsistent’ process to justify $24m ‘Gumboot Friday’ contract, auditor-general finds

The Auditor-general has criticised the government’s “unusual and inconsistent” procurement process in giving $24 million to Mike King’s Gumboot Friday initiative.

The government announced in May that the ‘I Am Hope’ foundation would receive $6m a year for four years to provide counselling services to 5-to-25-year olds. The funding was pledged as part of the coalition agreement last year and would provide access to free mental health counselling services for more than 15,000 young New Zealanders per year.

RNZ revealed in July that Ministry of Health officials had struggled to find a way to make the contract compliant with public procurement rules, and ended up invoking a special ‘opt-out’ clause designed for specialist health services.

Minister for mental health Matt Doocey has repeatedly maintained the opt-out rule was “used in compliance”.

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Now, the auditor-general John Ryan disagrees.

In a six-page letter to Director-General of Health Dr Diana Sarfati published this afternoon, Ryan raised multiple concerns about several aspects of the procurement process, including that there was no “clear justification” for invoking the opt-out clause.

“Several aspects of the process are unusual and inconsistent with good practice,” he writes.

Ministry of Health officials were “put in a difficult position” by the coalition agreement to fund ‘I Am Hope’, but they should have provided better advice on the rules to the minister, he said.

“The analysis appeared designed to retrospectively justify an outcome that had already been decided.”

Mike has become a favourite target to attack by the Left because we are angry he’s given National a media win by funding his suicide programmes.

I think attacking Mike is a mistake.

I’ve known Mike for about 20years. His passion and drive to respond meaningfully to the pandemic of suicide is breathtaking. The grief he wades through on a weekly basis from Whānau who reach out to him at their most raw and painful requires a strength and courage beyond my reckoning.

He is at the coalface of suicide and his voice matters. The systemic failures he sees are a reality that is constantly hidden by bureaucrats who desperately sanitize our suicide statistics.

Here was King in 2022…

…Mike is hated by the Wellington Bureaucracy for highlighting their incompetence and making them look like the callous wankers they are.

Mike is offering counselling services at a fraction of the price that the Wellington Bureaucracy offers and because he’s done such an excellent job of exposing their vested interests, he will never ever receive any money for his proposals because that’s what happens when you cross the Wellington Bureaucracy.

That’s where the friction point lies, Mike is offering a service cheaper than the State wants to fund with real world contact to help people talk the issues out before they get to the suicide flash point and as anyone attempting to access mental health services know, there is barely any functionality in the mental health area.

From the State’s point of view, half of those who commit suicide never reach out for help anyway so how on earth can they spend money attempting to save lives who don’t even bother to access services in the first instance.

For everyone else, that argument is callous.

Daniel McLauchlan is one of the greatest political columnists in New Zealand and his latest crusade on attacking the Wellington Professional Managerial Class raises important questions on how the State should regulate itself during Late Stage Capitalism that the Political Left need to look at…

Unjarndycing the State

The dogmatic political left invests its faith in the bureaucratic state; the dogmatic right trusts oligopolistic free markets – leaving New Zealand with crumbling infrastructure and corruption

…the Political Left have allowed the self-interested Public Service and the Professional Managerial Class to push self interested virtue signals rather than structural change and increased capacity of the State!

Daniel talks about the lack of actual competition to the self-serving Public Service and to that effect Māori Social Service Providers could easily become the competition the self serving Public Service needs while building State capacity with a Ministry of Green Works.

The lack of results from a self serving Public Service riddled with Corporate Consultants could finally be challenged by Māori Social Service Providers that treat everyone who comes, but in a Māori cultural setting.

That development can drive the self serving Public Service to be far more responsive and force actual results out of them.

It’s allowing regulated capitalism to inject the dynamic of competition while building State capacity.

Imagine a scenario where Iwi joined forces with the State to create a 3rd Supermarket Operator with a focus on lower costs to customers, better work conditions for workers and better prices for suppliers.

Or expanding existing community health groups that are open to the entire community but run within Kaupapa Māori.

Same with Māori schools.

You can generate the competitive friction Capitalism requires while building up the State, not denigrating it.

Mike King’s charity is an example of being able to create those competitive advantages that generate greater access for people needing counselling.

We may not like the way the Right have gerrymandered the process so they have a media coup to mask how awful the rest of their social policy is, but that’s politics over the end result and the end result is more people in need will get immediate access to counselling and when you consider how damaged the entire mental health infrastructure is, that is a win for those in immediate need.

The horror of our suicide rate gives us a glimpse behind the ‘she’ll be right’ facade of our culture and the dark torment of an alpha male macho mental landscape that is terribly fragile.

Our under funded social infrastructure, our ‘me first’ consumerism, our 30 years of neoliberal mythology, our disconnection from one another, our untreated pain, our lack of hope from grinding poverty in a first world country, our damaged masculinity, the intergenerational consequences of colonialism, our unspoken rage culture, our inability to express emotion beyond anger – all of this demands questions we don’t want to hear as a society and the shame of suicide continues to hide and smother any healing.

In a society that has no religious faith and all the cultural maturity of a can of coke, the bonds which keep us attached are frail and disconnected. In our fetishisation of individualism we have lost the central part of the human condition –  connection.

We have traded in our interwoven threads of whanau, friendship and kin for a race where no one wins.

The reason we can’t talk about suicide is because we can’t stand to talk about the dark treacle of self hate and loneliness at the core of consumer culture. We don’t dare confront the hollowness of our existence on these far flung crags of rock for fear of what we will reveal about ourselves.

Damaged individuals competing for a self identity too fragile for the storms and tempests of life.

Thanks to neoliberalism, we are further from each other than ever before.

Look at the manner in which our suicide rates jumped after the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, where we moved away from the communal towards the individual…

…we huddle frightened on these lonely rocks at the end of the world and slowly one by one slip off into the swallowing dark. Until we are prepared to confront many of the individualism-over-all myths and rebuild our tattered communities, our suicide rate will remain reminding us of our whispered deceptions.

We refuse to ask the why of suicide because we are too frightened to know the answer is a reflection of the shallow and lonely community we have become. Instead we reel off a list of phone numbers whenever we dare mention suicide as if that means a fucking thing.

We are broken and no one wants to admit that.

Mike King swims in this pain constantly and it has hurt him as much as it has hurt us which explains his anger at the Wellington Bureaucracy.

Damn him for giving the Right a publicity win, damn the Right for a joke process but don’t damn his intentions and outcomes. Mike has stood beside too many coffins at too many funerals for too many suicides to denigrate his mana the way some on the left have embarked upon.

Cool your jets comrades, the bigger enemies are National’s donors, not their virtue signals towards suicide.

Don’t attack Mike King – attack a Government underfunding mental health.

 

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50 COMMENTS

  1. The whole mental health system has been eroded for years till it was nearly extinct .Then it has been taken over by the drug use pandemic that is hitting NZ .So now we are using the mental health resources to treat drug abuse .The two should be separated and have separate funding .
    The increase in male suicide may also be the result of the bias in the family court system where the right to be a father to your child is striped away .Just because the adult relationship is broken does not mean that the male should not have the continued right to be a father .I have seen both sides of the coin within my family and its pretty dam ugly for the children who very quickly become used to control the male in most cases .
    There is no way that every man from a failed relationship does not want to be a father to his kids .From what I have seen that right to be a dad is stripped away very quickly .Yes there are some shit men but there are a lot of just as shit women as well who lie and manipulate the system for the sake of revenge .My mum used to say “hell has no furry like a woman scorned “.How often do the police turf the woman out of the house after attending a domestic dispute that may well have been started by the woman as I once witnessed .The attending police woman suggested the male take out a protection order with the court .When he applied with all the correct paper work he was laughed out of the place by the clerk who said he could not proceed because he is a he .

    • Mason Drury helped to create the Maori Health Authority which would assist the over representation of Maori in mental health. National immediately canceled the Maori Health Authority as they saw it as division.
      The National coalition will now fund private Charter schools to help children over represented with learning and behavioral issues.
      Hypocrisy is a policy of the National Government.

  2. Both Labour and the Nats have been underfunding health for yonks, all health. And education, and housing.

    Then this lot have the gall to set up a cop called Coster to identify and address the inevitable outcomes of chronically underfunding essential human needs, with a system devised by Bill English, an architect of the low income economy which keeps the have- nots, have-nots. The same Bill English who trashed all young New Zealand males as unemployables. Thanks for nothing Bill, tho I daresay that English and co will do ok out of it.

    • Like English’s wife who benefitted from a million dollar suicide prevention contract. LeVa ended Lifelines 10 year contract with Dr Mary English on the board of directors.
      That is a conflict of interest so therefore corruption.

  3. Probably most people on both sides of politics think Mike is a good guy doing good things. The attacker of the Health Ministry’s process is the auditor general, for hoity-toity bureaucratic reasons which may have their importance, but in the scheme of things won’t help mental health one iota, whereas gumboot friday will.
    Stepping up, when others like Police are stepping away…stay the course Mike.

    • Note the Auditor general in no way attacked Mike king and his organization .He was merely pointing to the corrupt way the funding was allocated without any checks and ballances so that Luxon could get Peters to join the coalition of corruption .

      • Yes, Gordon the National party hammered Nanaia Mahutas’ husband for awarding of contracts, yet this issue involves a lot more money has been a bit hush hush. Then we have Joyces consultant company and Blinglish company all got hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce reports in their own favor or their companies to get more money and contracts.

        • the hypocrisy of the MEDIA at its best .Hammer the left and demand heads on plates but say nothing when the nats and co are draining the coffers and changing laws to allow the PM to milk the system and make a million tax free and people wonder why David Parker wanted to tax rich pricks more .

  4. Mike King threw his toys out of the cot when he refused to apply for funding the same way other mental health groups had to apply. It’s now ironic that he had funding from these clowns without actually having to do anything other than rage against the Labour government. This has set a dangerous precedent and time will tell if other organizations now having their funding cut to the bone or no funding at all will test this precedent in court. Mental health is now a Mike king one trick pony there is no money for anyone else. Me thinks Matt Doocey is nothing but a smart arse and this will come back to actually bite him in the arse

    • You are correct NMG. Mike King helped to get the current government elected by attacking Labour for not sucking up to him.
      In my view he is no different to any of the people who donated cash. In fact he is worse because he put his cry baby antics up front and center with the right wing media. He knew exactly what he was doing. Manipulation at it’s best.
      I wonder if he has cut back on his overseas travel and got rid of the Range Rover because the Auditor General is coming to check the books.

    • Matt Doocey has an extensive career in mental health both here and the UK and has a BSc in counsellings so I would trust his assessment of the value of Mike’s work over others

  5. It is good that police are stepping back as first call when mental health is involves.
    Mental health has aways been treated as a poor cousin by both parties.
    Celebraties like Mike King and JK are to be congratulated and supported for putting it in the public space .
    Mental health effects all levels of society and the more it is put in the public eye the better.

  7. Gordon Campbell on Scoop has delivered a lot more information about this subject in his article about Luxon living in denial which is very enlightening.

  8. Matt Doocey has an extensive career in mental health both here and the UK and has a BSc in counsellings so I would trust his assessment of the value of Mike’s work over others

    • Without more funding and support for general practices, the New Zealand health system is headed towards “an unpleasant complete collapse within the next two years”.

      Buzz Burrell MB BS MRCPI FRNZCGP FDRHMNZ.

      I wouldn’t trust Doocey because others with better degrees in mental health have stated their displeasure at Nationals under funding and the harm they have created already.

  9. Mike Kings pogram is to help young people in schools learn to avoid suicide to help them while at school and later in life. That is something neither the education department nor the mental health department could get their shit together to do. A low-cost effective fence at the top of a cliff. It should have been given EXTRA budget money because it was new and effective. Instead, bureaucrats, ngos, and pollies scrap over which part of their mental ambulance fiefdom gets defunded. Hopefully, this common sense more fence policy means less mental ambulance work for kids.

    The 30% spike in suicides, after the 3rd labour government decided putting people on the dole rather than in jobs schemes and forestry service, railways, ministry of works feather beds was good for blokes and their families, is likely not going to fall away with advent of AI. With AI the middle-class lawyers, accountants and clerks will be newly purposeless. Mike King’s scheme will be needed more than ever.

  10. I cannot help but wonder where this $1.9b allocated to mental health by the previous government actually went because apparently 5 (five) new beds were installed in mental health units. Someone help me with the math, please.

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