THE RE-WRAP: How Good Does a Hospital Really Need To Be?

THE BEST BITS IN A SILLIER PACKAGE (from Monday's Mike Hosking Breakfast) Surgical Grade, Maybe?/WFH Has Become Wuite the Punching Bag/What Is Space Carpet?/NZ's Most Dangerous Bathroom

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a podcast from News Talk s dB
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Speaker 2 (00:25):
Rewrap.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
Okay, there, welcome to the Rewrap for Monday. All the best,
but it's from the mic cast and breakfast on news
Talks there'd be and a sillier package eyeing Glen Heart
and today a man working from home is really the
pubjict bag And everybody's hating on working from home, aren't they.
AI is now creating our TV commercials. So that's two
things I don't care about that we'll cover off there

(00:47):
and then we'll get into the building consent stuff at
the end of the podcast. But first up Dunedan hospital.
Speaking of building things, it's turned out to be a
bit too expensive. Say you're just going to have to
have a cheap one. Sorry guys.

Speaker 4 (00:57):
On the Dunedin hospital scaleback, the government is in trouble
on this right. That protest over the weekend was big.
Thirty five thousand people turning up to protest. What's going
on is more than a quarter of Dunedin's population. Now
to be fair, right, you've got to assume that they
didn't just come from Dunedin. They came from all over
the Otago region, and that will probably be true because
the hospital would service the whole regions. The whole region cares.

(01:20):
Even if you encounter include the population of the region,
that's fourteen percent of the population that turned up on Saturday.
That's still massive. Now, there are very few issues that
would drive that kind of frustration get that many people out,
but health is absolutely one of them, right because we
want to know that the medical facilities in our area
can save our kids' lives, or save our kids, our parents' lives,

(01:41):
or even you know, save our own lives. But this
is reality. Unfortunately, this is and I think that this
is something we're going to have to come to terms with.
We are broke. New Zealand cannot afford a three billion
dollar hospital, and we can't afford three billion dollar fairies,
and we can't afford to pay the wages of sixty
four thousand public servants or any number of other things
than we think that we should have. We just can't

(02:03):
have anymore. We are running and operating deficit in this
country every single year. What that basically means if you
were to compare that to your household, that's basically the
equivalent of spending more every single year in outgoings on
your groceries and your rent and your power bills whatever.
Then you're actually bringing in, Well, how do you make
up that shortfall? You chuck it on the credit card. Now,
that may be sustainable for a year or two, but

(02:24):
it is not sustainable year after year after year after year,
which is what we're doing. It you're doing at the moment.
If you want to know how broke we are, you
just need to listen to the Treasury warning that came
through last week. Dominic Stevens, the chief economist at Treasury,
warned at that for us to get back to surplus
in this country, the government will have to cut so
much spending so fast it would be unprecedented in recent

(02:49):
history in New Zealand. Our debt is out of control
largely and let's be honest about it, largely thanks to
what grant and just ended it during COVID. Treasury has
been warning about our debt levels they reckon for about
the last twenty years, since about two thousand and six.
Back in two thousand and six they were worried because
they thought that we were heading for a net crown
debt situation of around thirteen percent of GDP. We are

(03:12):
three times that now, that is how much trouble we're in.
So we are broke now. I don't want to see
projects like a hospital, especially scaled back, and I don't
want to be sailing on tin pop fairies that I'm
not sure are going to make it to the other side.
But you need money to buy and build things, and
we don't have any money. And judging by the size
of that protest on Saturday and the anger that's being
directed at the government at the moment, we clearly don't

(03:34):
realize that yet.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
I mean, to be honest, how good does your house,
this hospital really need to be? I mean, are we
talking surgical grades? Does it really need to it does?

Speaker 2 (03:45):
Right?

Speaker 3 (03:45):
Okay, so we wrap What if we send everybody home
from the hospital? Could we do working from home? Hospital?
Working from home so the patients stay home, the doctors
stay home. No, okay, just more stupid ideas.

Speaker 4 (04:00):
We'll tell you what. I did not expect the hostile
reaction the government is getting to its order for public
servants to go back into the office. I mean, this
was a week ago already, and people are still spitting
tax about this. Thing seven or eight days on. I mean,
one columnist over the weekend described it as modern slavery. Well,
that's meantal, isn't it. I mean, describing workers on an
average about one hundred thousand dollars as slaves just because

(04:22):
they're forced to go into the office is completely losing
the plot. They're obviously not slaves. They paid employees, and
they're being asked by their employer, which is the government,
to do what their contract says, which is simply to
go back into the office and work from there. Here's
a home truth for you, right. If you like the
working from home, get over it. It's going to end.
It's a losing battle. Most global CEOs now believe we

(04:43):
will be mostly back to working completely from the office
in the next three years. And this is according I mean,
this is reputable stuff. It's according to a survey by
KPMG had only out about a week ago. A year ago.
If you'd our CEOs, how many of us are going
to be back in the office? Is this thing going
to happen? They would be about sixty four percent of
them would have said yeah, we'll go back to the
office this year. Eighty three percent of them said we're

(05:04):
all back in the office in three years. Now. What
that tells you is CEOs are hardening their starf On
this running through list of companies you will recognize that
have already ordered their workers back either three, four or
five days a week. Starbucks, General Motors, Disney, Walmart, Twitter,
dal Amazon, Yahoo, Bank of America, and KPMG. And I

(05:24):
could go on, because that's not a comprehensive list. Our
public servants are lucky that the order from the government
is a little bit wooly and there isn't a number
of like a minimum number of days they actually have
to turn up for work. In Canada there is a
minimum number. It's three. Here, it's a bit more of
a vibe thing at the moment. But I think we
need to get used to this. I mean, it's been
a very nice experiment post COVID to have some flexibility,

(05:44):
and absolutely some flexibility will survive. But clearly most CEOs
of high performing companies have seen something in this that
they don't like. This is in workers work in one
hundred percent from home and for a lot of them
it's now over. So anyone giving our government grief over
this is either frankly remote working themselves or completely unaware
of global business trends.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
Ah, I forgot to tell you it's Heather this morning,
not Mike probably noticed, but anyway, Yeah, I sort of
take what she has to say about, you know, especially
the work climate in Wellington pretty seriously because she lived
down there for quite some time. And yeah, no knows
that knows the scene pretty intimately rerap right, So yes,

(06:26):
twenty twenty four, the Year of AI continues to roll
on artificially intelligent, which is different to a year that
is actually intelligent of course. And now, Kevally, Brentworth, have
you've got a TV commercial that's been made entirely by AI.

Speaker 4 (06:44):
On this AI ad? Okay, so I was telling you,
we'll play you a little bit of the AI ad.
This is Bremworth, isn't the carpet people. They are the
first ones to get AI to come and make an
ad a TV ad in New Zealand. Here it is,
I'm feeling.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
Beyond touch colors. You can feel a mood that LEDs yours,
soothes the soul and leaves you breathless. It's of the earth,
yet out of this world. It's more than the feel,

(07:20):
it's a feeling crafted feels different.

Speaker 4 (07:24):
I mean, it's like a like A like a It's
very safe, isn't. It's like a SPA version of an AD.
Isn't like you go to like a spa. If you
went to a spa to get your massage done and
that AD was playing, it wouldn't put you out of
the vibe, would it. This is the problem with the AI. Now,
this may be a thing. I don't know. We're going
to talk to them later in the air. But this
is the problem with the AI is that the AI

(07:45):
just doesn't have the pizaz. It's not going to chuck
a random bugger in there, like a dog falling off
the back of a ute, just saying a swear word.
That's not going to happen with AI anyway. We'll get
Brimworth to explain to us how cheap this was, because
that could swing your opinion on it. We all love saving.
Maybe we need a government to run the whole country
on AI.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
Now the problem is here. I haven't actually seen the AD.
I haven't seen many ads. I don't watch ads anymore.
Why do Why does anybody watch a anymore? What's going on?
That's why they invented subscriptions. So you could pay to
not watch ads. Anyway, I've heard that one a few
times because I recorded it and and then I played

(08:21):
it back. Of course, what's the out of this world
carpet that they were talking about? Are we getting space carpet?
That sounds cool? Rewrap right, We need to move on
to building consents now, because this is the latest thing
that the government is fast tracking and kicking ass on.
So let's have a little look at this.

Speaker 4 (08:40):
Hey, the government is considering and this is potentially quite
big news for anybody who's involved in renovating or building
or anything considering tiding up the building consent system. Now
at the moment, if you've done any of this stuff yourself,
and Lord, for my sins I have, you have got
to go get your building consent from the local council.
And then if you do it in Wellington, well you're
you know, you know what it's like in Wellington. It's

(09:00):
fairly inept anyway, So the councils are handling it. Sixty
seven of them local body territory whatever you call them,
you know, like local body council clusters. Yeah all that, Yeah,
thank you, much better way to describe it. Sixty seven
clusters are handling them throughout the country, and they all
have different interpretations of the rules, because of course they do.
So what the government is thinking of doing is somehow

(09:23):
just making this a little bit more streamlined, either forcing
the clusters to amalgamate, allowing them to voluntarily amalgamate, or
and this may be the better way of dealing with it,
I don't know, just chucking it to some sort of
a central body to oversee it.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
If we could just stop with all the duplication of
things that happen everywhere all the time. I mean, we're
not saying that nobody can come up with a better
way to do things, But if they do, can they
can you just pass that information on it everybody else
and everybody just do it the same way. There wrap
things like being able to add to drive this license

(09:58):
to your Apple wallet or your Google wallet. Why is
it they can do that in some places in the
world but not others. Makes no sense anyway, back to
the building on.

Speaker 4 (10:07):
The building can see. I think Chris Pink is onto
something here with these building consents and the authorities. But
I suspect that I just am not entirely sure if
the solution here is the interpretation of the rules or
the rules themselves need to be clarified. And I'll tell
you why. Because when I was living in Wellington, I
decided to renovate a house because I had nothing better
to do with my time at that stage obviously didn't

(10:29):
have any children, otherwise that wouldn't even be a consideration.
And I decided to renovate this house. And one of
the stipulations from the local building authority being the pack
of clowns Wellington City Council, was that I needed to
have safety glass in the bathroom. Now, safety glass in
the bathroom is something that is required by law, but
this is where the interpretation thing comes in, I think,

(10:49):
because the point of safety glass is that if you
slip over in a puddle and you fall through the window,
the safety glass is supposed to shatter, kind of like
a windscreen in a card, you know what I mean,
So it breaks up into little jewel like chunks rather
than shads that then sort of like scrape year to
death as you fall out the window. Here's the prop them.
The window was above the bath so in order and

(11:13):
it was high, and it was small, so in order
to be able to fall out that window and tear
yourself to shreds. You'd sort of have to do quite
like quite an amazing feet of falling upwards over the bath.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
What if you had like a really tall guest who
was an extravagant tooth flosser, you know, and going backwards
and forward knocks and a fist goes through the windows.

Speaker 4 (11:34):
And extraordinarily long arms that reach across the gigantic bath.
These are all possible. So I feel like this is
the mental contution that somebody in Wellington City Council obviously
didn't win. You eat safety glass six thousand dollars by
the way for safety glass, Thank god. Somebody said go
down the road to blah blah shop and buy the
sticker thing that you still just put a sticker over
the the glass for twenty bucks and it basically does

(11:56):
exactly the same thing to this day. I don't know
whether it was the Wellington City Council people who were like, hm,
I can see the flosser you might need to get
in safety glass.

Speaker 3 (12:05):
Yeah, you look like a person who knows a lot
of tall people.

Speaker 4 (12:08):
Floss could have been there, could have been the bad rules.
Don't know which of the two it is. I hope
that Chris Pink has looked into it, because I just
am not entirely sure if we take the Numpties out
of the situation, whether we don't just create more situations
for Numpties to be able to ruin for us.

Speaker 3 (12:23):
If you know what, you know what it sounds like
to me, it sounds like here's bathroom is an absolute
death trend, especially to people with long arms who like
to floss. Anyway, I am Gleen Hat. I've got a
water floster, so there's not quite this extremely gonna have

(12:43):
movements involved with it, so I should be okay, not
that I've got any immediate plans to go to Heather's bathroom.
That was We'll be back with more here the more
me can you take it tomorrow?

Speaker 1 (12:56):
I see it there For more from News Talks, the'd
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