Like many buses in Wellington, the Labour Bus doesn’t go very far before breaking down.

It was a tense week in Parliament as yet another Labour Minister, Michael Wood, has resigned as a minister over unidentified and unmanaged conflicts of interest including shares in Chorus, Spark, and National Australia Bank. Last week carries on the year’s theme of portfolio changes as Ministers are discovered for their conflicts of interests.

“I think you’re seeing in Parliament in general a lot of the wheels falling off the bus.” Brooke van Velden, Deputy Leader and health spokesperson of the ACT Party, said succinctly in an interview with AM on Wednesday. Young ACT agrees that recent events show that the government is shaking under the weight of their own doing.

Green Party Co-Leader Hon. Marama Davidson was ejected from the House for failing to apologise correctly for accusing the ACT party of intending to raise racist opinions amongst the New Zealand public.

These bizarre allegations were raised when ACT party was asking poignant and direct questions of the Prime Minister of Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand’s equity adjustor waitlist tool, when Davidson appealed to the Speaker seemingly as to ask the line of questioning be stopped.

It is perhaps the case that the coalition government is uncomfortable when critically questioned on the practicalities and motives of ethnically preferred candidates for surgery, and would prefer that the voters did not hold the government to account. If the argument was good enough, then it would stand up to scrutiny on its own without the need for attempting to prevent the question from being asked.

Young ACT believes that the equity adjustor waitlist tool sets a troubling precedent for democracy and social harmony in New Zealand. If it is Davidson’s opinion that a duly elected party inquiring on behalf of voters concerned over the coercive and stealthy nature of race-based policies is “raising racist opinions amongst the New Zealand public”, then this is to say that contesting the government’s policies are to cause harm, and that policies of ethnic preference for surgery do not cause disharmony.

Speaking on AM Show last Tuesday, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said that “evidence has been identified that suggests that Māori, Pacific, those from rural communities and those from low-income backgrounds have been waiting longer with the same clinical need for health care as other New Zealanders”. To this we would ask the government if ethnic discrimination is the best it can do to address the inadequacies in the health system, and if so, then why is more discrimination in the health system okay so long as it leads to equality of outcome?

Young ACT believes that the use of ethnicity is too rough a measure of assessing need, and runs contrary to the belief that individual medical need should always be the main determining factor in prioritising treatment. All other factors being equal, someone should not be given priority over someone else for treatment due to their ethnicity.

Your party vote for ACT this October is a vote to tell Labour: you do not treat people differently because of their race. You can sign ACT’s petition to end race-based waitlists here: End Race-Based Waitlists – ACT New Zealand.