Healthcare Not Warfare

The discussion about Covid-19 health care has focused on the ability of our health care system to cope with large influx of people requiring serious care and ventilators. Sitting at home is the best way to ‘flatten the curve’ we have learned, and not to add to the stress on that system.

In places like Italy and Spain, they have lost that battle with difficult ethical decisions having to be made about who lives and who dies.

Within this conversation, there has been some mention of the government’s recent stock take of the health system. It’s a shocking picture of long-term neglect and decay for the thing that is proving to be our most vital and essential service.

As the government is now actively seeking to find infrastructure projects that are ‘shovel ready’ and talk has already turned to giant roading projects, we should be demanding that the capital needs of the health service be put front and centre.

At the same time, we should be demanding that existing projects that funnel money to international weapons companies be abandoned completely, and plans for global war-making exercises be reconsidered.

The Ministry of Defence has a number of short and long-term projects that give hundreds of millions of dollars to weapons companies, often with cost blowouts costing hundreds of millions more and delays that would be intolerable in any other industry, all for work that we don’t need, for wars we shouldn’t fight.

The situation with the frigates’ weapons upgrade is case in point. What started as an obscene $493 million dollar contract with Lockheed Martin Canada has now nearly doubled in cost and has been delayed by years. As Victoria University academic Richard Ayson suggested, this situation is perhaps the best evidence that we don’t need the frigates at all.

In the same vein, the recent award of non-competitive contract to Lockheed Martin for one billion dollars for five new troop transport aircraft is breathtaking. Imagine if it was so easy for Whangārei to get its urgently needed new hospital for roughly the same cost.

The NZ military also has upcoming global military training exercises including RIMPAC – the abbreviation given to the US-led Rim of the Pacific exercises – that is still being planned despite the infection of sailors across the US Navy, and the risk of continued spread that such an exercise would entail. Human and financial resources that could be used for positive local benefit are going to practice making war on an imagined enemy of the US.

The pandemic allows us to see more clearly the holes that urgently need fixing in our social safety net – the things that have been struggling along for decades are now under severe pressure – particularly our health system and our housing situation. Meanwhile, the pandemic is also the starkest evidence of our shared humanity and our shared vulnerabilities across borders and across social divisions. Covid-19 is a horrific crisis, and the government has done well to seek to get in front of it. It now has the opportunity to use that crisis to restructure an economy for health and well-being, for peace and real security, not funding the industries that profit from death and destruction.

In coming days and weeks, as we discuss what our post-Covid-19 economic, political and social future looks like, we would be wise to reflect upon the words of US President Dwight Eisenhower, a man who had seen a great deal of death and destruction as the Supreme Commander of the US forces in Europe in World War II:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

We simply cannot afford to have a society in a constant state of preparedness for war. Instead, our future needs to prioritise peace and justice – defined in part as equitable and timely access to health services for every person on the planet - more than ever.

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