New Zealand First has released a 15-point health policy that argues the country is spending almost all of its health money on people who are already sick, and that the next government should redirect a slice of it into preventing illness in the first place.
The policy, called the plan to “Make NZ Healthy”, was published on the party’s website on Sunday 20 September, six weeks out from the general election on Saturday 7 November. The New Zealand Herald reported that party leader Winston Peters fronted the announcement.
“No one will disagree that we have a crisis in our health system,” the document opens. It says the party has spent three years listening to New Zealanders, public health experts, doctors and scientists, and concludes that “we have an epidemic of chronic illness impacting the lives of one million kiwis, overwhelming our hospitals, and putting unsustainable pressure on our economy.”
The central line is a familiar one, sharpened. “It’s time for new thinking with a bold shift from treating illness to preventing it,” the policy says. “That’s not a health system. That is an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, and New Zealanders are paying for the ambulance.”
The argument rests on two numbers. The first is that New Zealand spends $33 billion a year on health. That one checks out. Budget 2026 figures reported by interest.co.nz put total Vote Health spending for 2026/27 at $33,031 million, up from $31,511 million budgeted the year before.
The second number is the one doing the heavy lifting. The policy says “New Zealand’s own research shows that 59% of health spending is spent on treating chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease, the very illnesses that can largely be prevented – only 1.75% is spent on preventing them in the first place.”
The 59 per cent figure traces back to a 2019 study in PLOS Medicine by Tony Blakely and colleagues, which linked publicly funded health events for every New Zealand adult between July 2007 and June 2014. That paper reported, “A majority (59%) of health expenditure was attributable to NCDs.” NCDs are non-communicable diseases, and that category is wider than the two examples the policy names. It includes cancers, musculoskeletal conditions, mental and neurological disorders and respiratory illness as well as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and not all of them are preventable by diet or lifestyle in the way the policy implies.
Several of the 15 commitments are conventional and would sit comfortably in most parties’ health policies. New Zealand First says it will “reduce administrative burden and restore professional autonomy in General Practice”, “support our GPs by bringing health coaches into primary care” and “find better ways to acknowledge our nurses”. It also wants to “promote nutrition from primary school to medical school” and “require a full independent review of our dietary guidelines”.
Others are more unusual for an election platform. The party would “invest in hospital trials to assess the effectiveness of intravenous vitamin C pre- and post-surgery for preventing and treating infections”, “fund a review of vitamin D and determine optimal levels for maintaining health”, and “remove Medsafe/Pharmac barriers to recognised safe nutrients”. A further pledge is to “fund our New Zealand scientists to assess nutritional interventions for preventing and treating mental illness”.
On its face the vitamin C commitment is a research proposal rather than a treatment claim. The policy asks for trials to establish whether it works, not for it to be rolled out on the strength of existing evidence. Intravenous vitamin C is not currently a funded or standard part of surgical care in New Zealand hospitals, and the policy does not say what it would cost to test.
Two further commitments deal with patient rights. The party says it will “ensure that informed consent is a core part of quality healthcare” and “recognise that consumer choice is what leads to healthier decisions”. Informed consent is already a legal right under the Code of Health and Disability Services Consumers’ Rights, so the pledge appears to be about how consistently it is applied rather than about creating a new right.
The last two points of the 15 are agricultural rather than clinical. New Zealand First would invest in farm innovation that “improves productivity, soil health, sustainability and resilience while researching practical alternatives to potentially harmful agricultural sprays”, and back organic producers to “grow new markets”.
The policy takes a direct swing at rival parties over medicines funding, which has been one of the most reliably popular things to campaign on this term. “Having adequate funding for medicines is an essential part of the health system but should not be the goal nor seen as the solution – it will only ever manage the decline of our country’s health,” it says. ACT, by contrast, has campaigned on lifting the share of the health budget that goes to medicines every year until 2033.
There is an obvious tension in running as a change candidate on health. New Zealand First has been in government since late 2023, and its MP Casey Costello has held the Associate Minister of Health portfolio throughout. The party is asking voters to judge it on what it would do rather than on the health system as it currently stands.
The document closes by saying this is “just the first campaign announcement in the larger plan” to make New Zealand healthy, so more detail is presumably coming before advance voting opens on Monday 26 October. Enrolment closes at midnight on Sunday 25 October.
If you are still working out where the parties sit on health, prescriptions, hospitals and everything else, you can take our voting tool and see which party’s positions line up with yours.
What do you make of a health policy built around prevention, nutrition and vitamin research rather than more spending on medicines and hospitals? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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