From growing numbers to growing solutions – what's your plan to deal with dementia in NZ?
Alarming research shows three New Zealanders develop dementia mate wareware every hour and this is only set to get worse!
If we don’t act urgently, it risks overwhelming our health and aged care systems – and the impact on whānau, communities and the economy will be huge.
At our pre-election political panel on 1 September, we asked health spokespeople for each current political party ‘what’s your plan?’ to deal with the urgent health challenges facing Aotearoa New Zealand.
We’ve invited all the current health party spokespeople to be part of the panel in the lead up to the 2026 General Election. Five parties accepted the invitation to participate:
- NZ First – Health and Seniors spokesperson Hon Casey Costello
- National Party – Chair of the Health Select Committee Sam Uffindell
- ACT New Zealand – Health spokesperson Todd Stephenson
- NZ Labour Party – Seniors and Mental Health spokesperson Ingrid Leary
- Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand – Seniors spokesperson Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan
Questions
We asked each political party five questions in preparation for this panel. We’ve received answers to these questions from three parties so far and will update this page as other parties provide their answers.
Follow up questions
As promised, we packaged up all the questions from the panel that we weren’t able to get to on the night and sent them to the panellists Here are the first answers we’ve received and we’ll update these as we get more.
Here is the full list of questions we sent to all panellists. Please note some questions were asked of specific parties so aren’t on this list.