Health boss challenges business leaders on ‘plagues’ of fast-food pushers

“Maybe you look to support Green MP Chloe Swarbrick’s private member’s bill to assist limiting proliferation of liquor outlets and promotions”

The head of Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand, in a pitch for population health initiatives, is urging business leaders to consider supporting a Green MP’s bill to further restrict the liquor industry.

In notes for a speech to business leaders, Rob Campbell adopts colourful language in laying out the need to deal with New Zealand’s “plagues of sugar and fast-food pushers”.

The successful businessman and former unionist was scheduled to speak to a chief executives’ forum in New Plymouth today. He makes a strong appeal for population and public health measures, because of their potential to greatly improve the wellbeing of New Zealanders.

His speech is headlined “Time for a change in how we think about health” and considers what the owners, users and guardians of the health system can do to make things better.

Mr Campbell asks: “Is your business doing all it can to ensure that public health measures like vaccination, healthy working conditions, and wellbeing support, healthy food and water are available to your workforce and their whānau? Some are but many are not.”

“Are you doing anything about the plagues of sugar and fat fast-food pushers targeting low-income areas, or the liquor pushers on the same mission in your district. What about the proliferation of vape-pushers whose premises certainly do not look like they are a service to mature adult smoking cessation policies.

“Maybe you look to support Green MP Chloe Swarbrick’s private member’s bill to assist limiting proliferation of liquor outlets and promotions.”

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Ms Swarbrick’s Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill was introduced to the House on 30 June after being selected from the ballot of members’ bills but hasn’t yet had its first reading.

The bill would abolish appeals against councils’ local alcohol policies. The bill’s explanatory note says large companies have used their appeal rights to largely block the development of local alcohol policies.

“And those that have been adopted have only rarely included regulations over the location and density of stores selling alcohol. This means that communities have not been able to develop public health approaches to the provision of alcohol in their areas.”

In his speech notes, Mr Campbell goes on to ask if Taranaki chief executives are promoting healthy homes for all. Are they concerned about families struggling on low wages, or gender and ethnic pay gaps?

“Do you shudder or cheer when business organisations oppose actions to fix these on the basis of cost.”

He says the “elite mantra of ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’” applies, and the cost will show up, “either in the misery of others or in your tax bill”.

“Maybe you have made that choice and opted for others paying the bill with their distress. I hope not. When it comes to the health of our communities we must all work together.”

Mr Campbell promotes support for healthy physical activities – “or do nothing and watch the results queuing up” in hospital emergency departments. And he urges his business audience to donate to the Taranaki Health Foundation.

Turning to Te Whatu Ora’s agreements with health worker unions and non-government healthcare providers, Mr Campbell says the new agency must do better than the “jumble of historical arrangements” it inherited from the DHBs. The agency wants more relationship-based, rather than narrowly transactional contracts – but only with those committed the principles of equity, efficiency, effectiveness, inclusiveness and accessibility on which the agency is based.

The agency wants to work with unions and professional organisations as allies “in the workforce future you rightly advocate for”.

“For people like GPs, urban or rural, we do recognise the stresses and difficulties your structure faces in this world. We know that how you are funded and how you relate to other…services we deliver needs to change. That is a shared need, let us work on it together as partners not adversaries.”