If you want to racially abuse hospital staff and demand white only nurses, fine. We will draw a curtain around your bed, and you’ll lie there and wait. You need pain relief, assistance to go to the loo, have your sheets changed, have your blood pressure monitored - make sure it's not getting dangerously high. You lie there and you wait. You wait for a white nurse to come on duty. You might be waiting a while.

I don't know how this ugly racist who the poor people at Waitakere Hospital have had the misfortune to be dealing with defines “whites only” in his tortured little brain. Do they mean Pakeha New Zealanders? Although I'm sure they never refer to them as Pakeha. Would an Irish nurse with a pale complexion but without New Zealand citizenship do? If it was based on whites only, I wouldn't have had the operations I've had done in a timely fashion if I was waiting for someone with a pale face to turn up and do them. Nor would I have had the care and attention I've received in hospital if I had depended on white only nursing staff and hospital aides to provide it.

More than 30 staff at one of Waitākere Hospital wards took the unusual step of signing a cease work order in July, after a patient had reportedly abused them and made sexually suggestive comments over a period of six weeks. They shouldn't have had to put up with it for a minute, far less six weeks. It was only when they signed the cease work order that management actually did something about it, and told the patient he would be discharged, or they'd call on the police if he didn't stop what he was doing immediately. And guess what he did? He stopped. That's what bullies do. You front up to them, you face them off and they will back down.

Six weeks they had to put up with this. Health workforce leaders say Health New Zealand needs clear national guidelines for responding to racial discrimination against staff, saying it should not have required a cease work order to resolve the incident, and no it bloody should not. Nor should hospital management acquiesce to any patient’s demands about the ethnicity of hospital workers. Remember the Herald report earlier this month that revealed leaders at North Shore Hospital agreed to a patients request to have no Asian staff at their surgery? A decision which angered workers and was condemned by unions. These are not isolated incidents.

I can't imagine how ugly the abuse would have had to have been for the staff to take a stand, because they're abused every single day – which is incomprehensible. These are people trying to help you, trying to fix you, trying to give you comfort no matter if you've bought about your own misfortune or not. They, unlike some of the patients, leave judgement at the door and they are professional, they are caring, they are skilled, and they are human. They have a breaking point – six weeks of constant abuse, a barrage of racial abuse and sexually suggestive comments, you know what? They're going to draw a line too. They also come from all over the world, as do hospital staff in just about every healthcare system in the world. Hospitals are a beautiful meld of cultures and ethnicities, all working together to do their very best for you.

You want whites only? You won't find any hospital anywhere in the world that can offer you that, because the global health system would collapse without the very best from every country in the world working collaboratively.

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More than 30 staff at Waitākere Hospital refused to care for a racially abusive patient in a bid to get hospital managers to defuse the situation.

The male patient had asked for white-only staff, making racist and sexual remarks over a period of six weeks.

Their drastic action prompted hospital managers to escalate their response and defuse the situation.

New Zealand Nurses Organisation delegate Ben Basevi told Kerre Woodham he thinks management was out of touch, and didn’t come down to see what was happening when complaints started arising.

He said that when they talked to staff about the situation, it was clear that nothing short of the cease work order was going to work.

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Yesterday afternoon, a woman was taken to hospital in a critical condition after being seriously injured in an assault on board a bus broad daylight. Shortly before 6pm, police confirmed the person had died in the hospital – they said the victim was a passenger on the bus. They say nobody else is at risk at the moment, they know who the alleged offender is, but it's unsettling. This is not the norm, this is not what should be happening. You should be able to board a bus on a quiet Wednesday and get to your destination safely without being abused, without being spat at, without being assaulted, and without being stabbed until you die.

There's something horribly aberrant about this. We've had a lot of good news recently, the Coalition Government has been talking tough on crime since they were campaigning to be elected, and then we've had the good news announcements of major criminal organisations being busted - Comanchero’s down south, Mongrel Mob in Opotiki. We've had the announcement of more cops on the beat, a visible sign of the police being around, which does so much to make people feel safe and does a lot to prevent crime. There are already about 30 officers working the beat in Auckland City. The total police force on the beat in Auckland will exceed 50, it’s expected to have exceeded 50 by the end of last month. Seventeen officers deployed in Wellington, in Christchurch an extra 10 tramping the footpaths, and by the end of the two-year roll out Coster said there would be 21 officers deployed in each of Auckland's three policing districts, making up 63 additional officers on the beat across the region.

So that is great, these are good news stories that do make you feel better, but you cannot have a police officer on every bloody bus or every train. You can't even have a security guard on every bus or every train. Incidents like this happen, and then you get the New Zealand Crime and Victim Survey coming along, asking questions, do you feel safe? And you say no, I bloody don't. I don't feel safe when a person can be stabbed on a bus in broad daylight on a Wednesday.

The sixth New Zealand Crime and Victim Survey that was released in June interviewed thousands of New Zealanders about their experience of crime, whether they reported it or did not report it. Although it should be noted they didn't talk to businesses, and a hell of a lot of crime affected business over the last few years. People said they felt unsafe, despite the fact that crime rates have remained steady over the last three or four years. All of the good news can be forgotten when something as random and as savage as this incident occurs.

I think the idea of addressing the situations where crime occurs is a good one. If we're looking at families that are at risk, we need to focus on them. So, the Social Investment Agency, that is a good move. Investing in community programs that work is good. Investing in more rehab centres, drug and rehabilitation centres would be excellent. I still don't believe there are nearly enough facilities available for people who want to get help, for families who want loved ones to get help. The promised care in the community for those who are severely disordered, not there, and hasn't been there for a very, very long time. So you've got to look at the drivers of crime as well as crime itself.

Great, we've got the Coalition Government talking tough on crime, actually making a difference when it comes to getting police on the beat, actually making a difference when it gets more police officers policing, rather than acting as social workers. When you've got drug rings being disrupted, all of this is good. This is feel good stuff, but it only takes one random incident and people are unsettled.

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