A cruel lie: How else do we judge National’s broken promise on cancer drugs?

Sunday, 2 June 2024

Wellington man Toby Fuller has an aggressive form of blood cancer and is weighing up moving to Australia to acess treatment he can’t get in New Zealand. He had hoped the treatment would be funded in the budget.

Tracy Watkins is editor of The Post and Sunday Star-Times.

OPINION: The Black Budget. The Mother of all Budgets. Budgets are often remembered for what they take away, rather than what they hand out.

Nicola Willis’ first Budget is destined to be one of those.

It delivered on one promise - to adjust tax thresholds, delivering as much as $20 a week to people, at a cost of billions of dollars.

And it broke a more solemn promise, to fund new cancer drugs, costing a few hundred million dollars at most, from a total health budget of $17 billion.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis at the Budget lockup watched by David Seymour and Chris Bishop

But the promise to fund these drugs was never about cost anyway - if cost had been an issue, National surely wouldn’t have campaigned on such a big promise in the first place.

So it was always about hope, and the value we place on memories.

If you have ever been affected by cancer - and what family hasn’t? - you will know what that means.

My mother’s life was prolonged by cancer treatment; in her early 70s when she was diagnosed, she gained three more years of life from drugs and chemotherapy.

In an actuarial sense the cost probably outweighed the benefits of those three extra years.

But there’s a picture in my bedroom that tells a different story; it shows Mum, body-surfing with her granddaughter at our favourite family beach.

She was probably about a year into treatment at that stage. That photo, and memories of their grandmother for her grandchildren, wouldn’t have happened without drugs, and palliative chemotherapy.

Wellington man Toby Fuller has an aggressive form of blood cancer, and after a disappointing Budget he is planning to move to Australia to access the drugs he needs. (Video first published June 1 2024.)

And that’s the thing about promising to fund cancer drugs then ripping that hope away.

For every broken promise of a new drug, there is a parent desperately hoping for more time to make memories with their children; there are children whose parents are praying for more time so a miracle cure might come along; there are young adults, broken by a terminal cancer diagnosis, just as they are on the threshold of an exciting new life.

The despair many feel is that drugs that are funded and available overseas are not funded here. National capitalised on that despair in Opposition, promising to put it right.

The Budget failed the people who voted for hope.

We can now be quite clear about what lay behind that promise. It was cynical electioneering, nothing more. Because it turns out the promise was easily expendable.

Former National finance minister Steven Joyce called it “inexplicable”. Cancer patients, waiting on the lifeline that National dangled in front of them in Opposition, would use stronger language. Betrayal. Cruel. A lie.

Promising to do it next year isn’t good enough. When you have cancer, the clock is always ticking. A year can literally be a lifetime.

So I’m with Joyce. Of all the promises National might have chosen not to keep, abandoning the promise to fund life-prolonging cancer drugs is inexplicable.

In the initial Budget hoopla this wasn’t the biggest story of the day, and it may not have made as much noise as it should. But as National will quickly discover, it’s a story that won’t die, unlike the people it let down.

Every week, there will be more cancer patients pleading for drugs and treatments that might offer them hope of living for a few more months, or years. And National’s broken promise will be front and centre every time.

Joyce believes the policy will be quickly fixed once the enormity of the mistake is grasped. But someone in National’s ranks should have been switched on to the political risk in the first place. It’s a concern that its political antennae for risk is so far out of whack.

Was National captured by officials ? Was it eventually persuaded by the arguments about costs versus benefits, about processes and priorities, even though it rejected all those arguments in Opposition?

When you’re talking about human life, as with previous debates about funding Herceptin and Keytruda, politics trumps process a lot of the time.

So Joyce is probably right, and this policy will be revisited quick-smart.

But the epitaph for Nicola Willis’ first Budget may already be written.

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