Newstalk – Government abdicating decision-making to its advisers and civil servants

The problem is not the Deputy Chief Medical Officer – public health doctors worldwide are advising caution. The problem is a “government” abdicating decision-making to its advisers and civil servants, pushed out for daily press conferences instead of developing options to feed into a real strategy.

A healthy society is more than the absence of illness, more than the absence of one disease, which is, sadly, endemic in almost every state in the world. It’s government’s role to develop a strategy to deal with this reality while maintaining a functioning society and economy.

Maybe that’s the problem with this government, made up of many who bear direct Ministerial responsibility for an utterly inadequate health system, responsibility for which they don’t want to accept or even be associated with. There is no strategy to deal with their past mistakes.

It’s also the responsibility of Government to protect human rights and to deal with other issues facing us, like lack of housing, rural decline, climate change, etc., based on advice to government from many quarters, including, but not limited to, public health.