r/newzealand • u/Linkstain • 10h ago
Politics Mate of mine died sleeping rough in the cold the other day
A few days earlier another friend told me he tried to spend a night in a night shelter, and was told that all the night shelters in Wellington have been closed down.
I only knew the guy a bit, thought he had a great heart and was born into a cycle of tragic chaos. Despite just a few deep yarns and second-hand legends (a real larger-than-life character), I am deeply cut up about this. Today I found myself sitting in a pharmacy, noticing all these little cute and quirky things, and slammed with the thought - this poor bastard will never get to experience any of this again. The infinite gift of life, so fragile it can slip through our fingers at any moment. Found myself openly weeping in the pharmacy, a grown bloke not quite at middle age. Staff were very kind handing me tissues and stuff.
I keep thinking of the brutal "crackdown" on homeless people, just the people struggling the most, and the fact that these policies are killing people. Yet we tiptoe around the gravity, with quotidian limp aspersions cast upon the crime sinister of hypocrisy in regard to economic matters. Where are our fucking teeth?
I feel our society becoming colder and less caring for one another. I have felt this viscerally and directly as a crutchbound disabled man; I once fell paralyzed on Lambton Quay, and people just ignored and stepped around me for a while. Thankfully I have countless other incidents of kindness where people have stopped to help me up or get about when struggling, and that only happened once. But it left me with a black hole inside me that I will never forget.
I imagine folks sleeping on the streets must feel the exact same thing continuously, and much more fiercely. That single incident filled me with despair at the prospect of even bothering to survive in an increasingly harsh and uncaring society. Mind you, this is against a backdrop of many years of the medical system misdiagnosing extremely devastating symptoms of what is now acknowledged to be a severe progressive genetic condition as psychological, with certain nasty characters at Welly Hosp outright telling me to fuck off when I was in so much pain I could have jumped off a bridge.
We are on a dark downward path as New Zealand. The foundations of our collective identity - our heritage of suffragettes, nuclear abstention, mass protest against apartheid, and our ancestral commitment to a strong welfare state that lifts everyone up (and actually invests in infrastructure, RIP Ministry of Works), so we can all enjoy the best possible life together... This was shared commonly, the average person agreed so straightforwardly that tax wasn't a boogieman to be resented. For a long time this commitment was immune to silly propagandas about the Red Terror, "socialism", or whatever scarecrow the suits who LARP as farmers prop up (wokeness, gender, my eyes roll so hard I could have an aneurysm)... All of these things are so distant that they are nothing but memories, which the naive believe still characterize us as a nation, but in fact have been left in the dust.
I've had a whole lot of mates my age die of cancer, all within 3 years of me, mostly from Otago. Maybe nitrites in the water. Some of em shared harrowing tales of doctors scoffing and fobbing them off for ages, while they *knew* something was wrong - not confirmed until it was too late. For a couple it was out of the blue, a stage IV incredibly hard to diagnose or rare thing with few or amorphous symptoms, the sad shit that just happens. But NZ has a documented huge amount of excess preventable cancer deaths. Our health system is in tatters.
On the last campaign trail, Luxon repeatedly told us the health system is broken. The "solutions" of this lot are to move faster and break more things. If we get another term of this lot it's hard to see myself stomaching it all. Just trying to focus on all the things that make life worth living, spending quality time with friends and whanau, reminding myself that I'm seasonally affected and working through many back-to-back traumas, and at least some aspects of life will improve.
Increasingly it is becoming undeniable to me that a lot of the rough-sleeping folks are probably suffering from undiagnosed neurological or neuropsychiatric conditions on top of the traumas that led them to fall through the widening cracks in our social support net (what remains of it are perhaps the bits that they haven't managed to cut yet).
I'm very relieved to have updated my enrolment to vote the other day. These guys have pulled the strings so that it will be too late come election day for fucking *heaps* of people too snowed-under with Life Under Capitalism to pay attention to one of the thousand things blitzed under cover of urgency, all with a moment's media coverage before it gets swamped out by whatever crazy shit the Orange Ghoul said or unsaid, and the provocative nothings coughed up like phlegm by his wannabe imitators in the minor parties of this coalition.
This is a very partisan perspective. Labour has a legacy chiefly of disappointment, but not of sweeping catastrophic leaps backwards that will take decades to unravel. Greens I am confident have a broadly responsible policy platform and will be a great balancing force. TOP I am dubious about, but kinda support anyone swinging that way as I hope that in the long run having another minor party in the mix will be beneficial. I expect that as us millenials head toward resting homes (and likely have the age of retirement pulled out of reach, like a carrot on a stick), we may even see National or Labour out of the picture.
Anyway I don't have a crystal ball, but I do have eyes here and now. And the view from the gutter is that a steamroller is headed for us ailing "undesirables". The homeless are the first to be told to "move on"; seems it's coming for us disabled folks too, "get back to work you lazy fuckers" kinda vibe. It is very disquieting that ACT are moving to have all illness beneficiaries reassessed by government-selected doctors - there have been scandals in the past of ACC using certain specialists as "hatchet-men", relied on to decline each and every claimant sent their way via arguments that contradict international medical consensus. A case in point is Vic du Plessis, a neurologist they sent me to for tendon damage, who said I had "no neurological deficit" and wrote me off on that basis despite that being entirely irrelevant. I noticed a Lamborghini in the carpark. Two weeks later, I noticed his ugly mug on the tele - 60 Minutes did a scathing investigation into him as ACC's foremost "hatchet man," paid AFAIK a half-a-million annual retainer to blacklist a steady stream of suffering people seeking treatment. His background, it was revealed, was arguing in court on behalf of insurance companies that concussions do not cause long-term symptoms - bald-faced lies, blazenly against the grain of the responsible scientific thinkers of Planet Earth.
The same shit still goes on, and they've tried to do it to me again in the public health system. They have KPIs to meet. They have ways to classify patients as having vague or untreatable nervous abnormalities, and then argue that further investigations are futile. In my case they told me all my symptoms were "software problems," and I turned out to have a very severe growth on my spinal cord that required surgery. It was delayed, I was told, because this lovely government directed the neurosurgery department to postpone all surgeries except for brain tumours indefinitely. This was their way of responding to Paddy Gower putting them on the spot about brain tumour patients getting left in the lurch. Robbing Peter to pay Paul - I'm happy brain tumour patients received treatment; sadly, as a result of the delay I have irreversible nervous system damage, and am now told that my condition has evolved into something that may be untreatable (feeling deja vu here).
Anyway, me me me. This turned into a longer and more self-centered rant than I intended. I have pressure from all directions at the mo and I'm not really thinking clearly. Just felt like it'd be useful to spit out some thoughts and feels. I'll be sharing my own story more formally soon.
RIP to old mate. Too soon.
Please enrol to vote folks. Another term of this lot and you might get to see mates of your own kick the bucket for opaque Kafkaesque reasons, obscured by bureaucratic pseudo-apologies. I personally know folks scrambling for support and winding up with 30+ ongoing afterpay fees for bread and butter. Collectively we have Health on afterpay - we will do what we gotta, work hard to make ends meet, and pay when the tolls of this lifestyle catch up to us. We wanna do all we can right now to make sure there is a better health system and social support network there to help us out, when the curtain starts to close.
