National’s response to mental health is a sick sad joke that should rule them out of Government

Our nations mental health system is functionally broken. It has been underfunded so the Government can pretend it has a surplus for tax cuts, and the deep mental health issues caused by insecurity of employment, poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, inequality, social status, toxic masculinity, the soullessness of consumer culture and alienation of neoliberalism  have combined to produce a suicide rate that critics claim could be 3 times higher than officials acknowledge.

This is a Government who only admitted this year after 9 years in power that their youth suicide policy wasn’t working.

Ultimately it is National’s free market ideology that makes it impossible for them to be part of the solution because their cutting of funding to public services is part of the problem.

In a desperate attempt to try and hide the impact of their underfunding, National have launched ‘17 new mental health initiatives‘ in mental health which while sounding impressive, unbelievably don’t do a bloody thing to solving the crisis.

They are reshuffling money that was already declared in the budget, launching pilot schemes and are using the Orwellian  big data ‘Social Investment’ model which is an attempt by Bill English to unleash his final neoliberal fantasy into social welfare by redefining the ‘truly needy’ as the poor while eliminating everyone else from eligibility.

It is this fundamental hatred of well funded universal services that has caused the maelstrom in our public services and exacerbated the social problems.

All National have announced is 17 new right wing social experiments to try and fix the dysfunction  they are exacerbating by using solutions that are the problem!

They are simply trying to blind the electorate with bullshit while the problems in mental health and health get worse and worse.

Such arrogant and blinkered ideology as social policy should be savaged by the media, but the news is so dumbed down now that even attempting to express this in terms of ideology would be too frightening to your average entertainment ratings obsessed news producer

Nothing the Government announced today solves the problems National have created in mental health, that they have offered up such hollowness as an answer rules them unfit to govern.