I’m not talking GPs or Lakes District Hospital, who do their level best – the latter in straitened circumstances.

The burning issue is how Queenstown is continually short-changed and often downright shafted by grey-faced health bureaucrats from Invercargill or Dunedin at Southland District Health Board and Otago’s DHB, now virtually one health board.

I’m talking about Wakatipu families in tears as dear old mums, dads, grandparents are exiled to out-of-the-way places like Winton because the DHBs won’t stump up for adequate elderly-care facilities here.

I’m talking young mums – lots of them – having to go to Dunedin or Invercargill weeks before their babies are due, again because the DHBs won’t put an obstetrician up here.

And I’m talking ordinary, everyday patients – probably thousands over a year – forced to go to hospital in Invercargill or Dunedin, often under their own steam and their own cost, for tests or minor procedures because the “stuff you, Queenstown” attitude of the insular DHBs demands that we go to them rather than them coming to us.

SDHB’s been a downright shocker for the Wakatipu and Otago’s DHB isn’t proving much better.

In my 26 years at Mountain Scene, I can’t recall any other public organisation – not one – that’s taken as many king hits news-wise as SDHB. Yet’s there’s no sign of these Invercargillites lifting their game in the Wakatipu to avert the next big scandal just waiting for some reporter to open another can of worms.

ODHB’s treatment of the Wakatipu is almost as hapless and scandalous. Last week’s expose in Mountain Scene of the resort’s hepatitis-A scare in May is a case in point.

The two previous SDHB bosses in particular were dead losses for Queenstown. Remember Dr Gershu Paul? First branded “the dirty doctor” who touched up a young secretary, he then became “the drunk doctor” picked up by cops for being over the limit – after which he resigned.

I call his successor, Nigel Murray, “Dr Do-Nothing”. He was all talk about improving Wakatipu healthcare before suddenly shoving off to Canada. Murray was on close to $400,000 a year and what do we have to show for it here? Virtually nothing.

Local health services are so bad that Maria Cole and her well-meaning but ineffectual Wakatipu Health Trust have taken what I fear is a very soft option. Even a dangerous option.

Instead of lobbying hard and high for our fair share of the health dollar, Cole is now tapping local community trusts for funds to pay for what the DHBs should be coughing up. Cole has tapped the Central Lakes Trust for a scanner at Lakes District Hospital to cut down transfers to Invercargill, and now her trust is talking about a similar begging-bowl solution for new elderly-care facilities.

Maria Cole, you and I pay our taxes – and the Wakatipu probably pays more tax per capita than either Invercargill or Dunedin folk do – so why let the government off the hook?

I say put political candidates right on the line when they start campaigning. As the election looms, National candidate Bill English is starting to show his face in Queenstown.

Labour’s candidate – does anyone know who it is? – will no doubt start pressing local flesh as well.
And we should press their flesh too. Hard.

Anytime the candidates make a healthcare pledge, ask them to shake hands on it, Queenstown.