When Health Minister David Cunliffe issued his bellicose “bring it on” challenge to junior doctors, he made it clear that he wasn’t giving in to anyone within a couple of weeks or a couple of months – and he just stopped himself from saying a couple of years or a couple of millenia.

He appears intent on wasting far more of our health taxes by personally defeating the strikers (some say more than $12 million on the initial wave of action alone) than it would cost to settle their original pay claim in full.

This is a deaf, dumb and blind minister who prefers hyprocritical oaths to the Hippocratic one sworn by junior doctors, who now find themselves breaking their own promise by withdrawing care to the sick.

This is a minister who rides roughshod over elected DHB members and declares that 21 boards for four million people is OK by him, despite overwhelming evidence of chronic under-funding, bloated mismanagement, alleged corruption and massaged waiting lists.

We’re not helped in the least by National’s health minister in waiting, who also thinks that 21 boards are OK – providing yet another example of National’s copy-cat and policy-free approach to the next election (which National will lose unless it rapidly regains some sense of direction, because we might as well vote for the current set of idiots than a new set of incompetents. Better the prats you know, as the saying goes…).

There are several thousand sick people who will needlessly suffer because of these strikes. A few of their relatives may blame the strikes for their loved-one’s death.

Quite why Winston Peters gained another $600 million for his foreign ministry is hard to understand, when reasonable people might believe that this money could have been better spent closer to home, perhaps on health…

This country is currently leaking talent at the rate of 42,000 people a year, and many of them are junior doctors we have at least partly paid to train. Understandably, many of them have huge loans that would be more easily repaid by earning better salaries overseas.

There are some senior clinicians who loathe the strike, and say that doctors should be above all that. They are wrong. Like every other job these days, money talks and talent walks if the rewards do not match the skill. It’s all very well for these comfy oldies to moan about strikes – they didn’t have student loans and their future is secure. Some of them are being paid large amounts to cover for junior doctors – making them, in a sense, strike-breakers.

Make no mistake: Junior doctors are morally wrong to strike. Industrial action in the health service (as well as the police and other vital public utilities) is outdated and uncivilised. But until we have politicians who have the integrity and honesty to deal with the health service fairly and impartially, we cannot trust them to outlaw such action.

Since Cunliffe believes that he is in charge and has embarked on this confrontational course, there appears to be no sensible person left to bang a few heads together. Which means that innocent victims will suffer for no other reason than to satisfy an immature politician’s arrogance and some young carers’ decision to fight him.

They should all hang their heads in shame, grow up, and start negotiating.