Listen, I agree with the ACT Party that Health NZ needs to drop this nonsense of encouraging staff to incorporate a prayer into their daily routine.

What is this? Are we living in the 6th century with the height of Christianity? This is very unmodern.

Now, the reason we know about this is because the ACT Party's been leaked an email that was sent to staff that says: 

"We encourage everyone to incorporate Karakia daily. To help support you with this, we have created some pre-recorded videos to learn Karakia."

Now, we don't know which staff are being encouraged, but let’s assume it's for everyone, because that's generally how organisations work when they roll something like this out - they roll it out to absolutely everyone.

So let’s assume that this also involves doctors and nurses and surgeons and anaesthetists and so on. 

You been a hospital lately?

Those people are run off their feet, they are so busy patients often have to wait half an hour - sometimes an hour - for a nurse to respond to something that they need.

You want a doctor to answer basic questions? You have to get them on their 8am round and if you don't - good luck to you.

Do we really think that people who are madly understaffed, who are run off their feet, who are having such a difficult time at work also have time to stop and say a prayer?

Come on, Health NZ, have some priorities.

What's more is that this is completely inappropriate in the modern world to force religion on anyone in a workplace. And that is what this is.

You can call it a Karakia to make it sound cool and fashionable and culturally aware, but it’s a prayer. And a prayer is a religious act. And I say that as someone who identifies broadly as Christian, not cool.

This is fundamentally one of the biggest problems with the public service. Across many departments, they have allowed themselves to get distracted by stuff like this, which is not their core job.

They need to act more like the private sector and just do the work - and forget everything else
And then, maybe they’ll actually be good at their job. You never know.

Now, it is worth saying - if you object to this, you have to be logically consistent and also object to the prayer at the start of Parliament. Because that is, frankly, forcing religion on people and wasting time.

I object to that as well, scrap them both.

But scrap the Health NZ prayer first, because that is wasting the time of people whose jobs are literally to save lives.

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