Please note below the policy recommendation for nutrition, intravenous Vitamin C and informed consent.
Make New Zealand Healthy: A Courageous Prescription for National Renewal
After more than 45 years in nutritional and environmental medicine, I have learned one enduring truth: a nation cannot medicate its way out of chronic disease. Hospitals, surgery and pharmaceuticals have important roles, but they cannot compensate for poor nutrition, metabolic dysfunction, environmental toxicity, inactivity, chronic stress and the neglect of prevention.
That is why I enthusiastically support the campaign to Make New Zealand Healthy.
This independent charitable movement has set itself an inspiring objective: to end the epidemic of chronic disease by transforming a reactive sickness system into a prevention-first culture. It recognises health as physical, mental, social and environmental wellbeing—not merely the management of symptoms with an ever-growing list of drugs. Its proposals include nutrition education from primary school through medical school, holistic and integrative healthcare, genuine consumer choice, informed consent, greater professional autonomy for doctors, improved access to safe nutrients and stronger research into environmental health. Make New Zealand Healthy
This is not tinkering around the edges. It is a serious attempt to change the direction of an entire nation.
The campaign also understands that human health cannot be separated from the health of the soil, food, water and environment. Its proposals to support farmers through better agricultural science, establish a national environmental research institute and require environmental decisions to use the best available evidence represent joined-up thinking that has been missing from modern healthcare.
Most importantly, Make New Zealand Healthy is prepared to say what governments rarely admit: spending more money on sickness does not necessarily produce a healthier population. New Zealand is spending approximately NZ$33 billion annually on healthcare while chronic illness continues to overwhelm families, clinicians, hospitals and the national economy. The campaign’s answer is both radical and remarkably sensible—reduce the number of people becoming sick in the first place.
New Zealanders should be proud that such a movement has emerged. It is courageous, constructive and deeply humane. It offers hope instead of resignation and practical reform instead of another layer of bureaucracy. Its stated program is a campaign and policy platform seeking national implementation; it is not yet a package adopted by the New Zealand Government. Its ambition is to bring these proposals into the 2026 election debate and help translate reforms into action after the election. That distinction makes public support all the more important.
Across the Tasman, Australia presents a depressing contrast.
Australia does have a National Preventive Health Strategy 2021–2030, so it would be inaccurate to suggest that prevention is never mentioned. The strategy promises a greater focus on prevention and action on the wider determinants of health. Australian Government Department of Health
But where is the comparable national campaign for nutrition throughout education? Where is the serious integration of nutritional and environmental medicine into mainstream care? Where is equitable access to qualified integrative practitioners? Where is the determination to restore clinical independence, defend informed consent and examine the environmental and metabolic causes of disease? Where is the national mobilisation to make Australians well rather than merely expand the machinery that manages them after they become sick?
Australia continues to pour enormous sums into hospitals, pharmaceuticals, screening programs and downstream disease management. We speak endlessly about healthcare funding while avoiding the more important question: Why are so many Australians becoming chronically ill?
A strategy sitting on a government website is not a health revolution. Prevention must be visible in schools, universities, medical education, agriculture, primary care, public policy and every Australian home. It must be funded, measured and implemented with the same urgency that governments apply to hospitals and pharmaceuticals.
Make New Zealand Healthy offers an example Australians should study and emulate. It places people before systems, prevention before lifelong disease management, and health before institutional convenience.
I congratulate everyone behind this courageous initiative. They are not simply campaigning for another health policy. They are advancing a national vision—one in which children are taught how to remain healthy, doctors are free to practise more comprehensively, citizens retain meaningful choices, safe nutrients are accessible and governments confront the causes of disease.
New Zealand has lit a beacon. Australia should stop admiring the light from across the Tasman and begin building its own movement.
It is time to Make Australia Healthy.
The most important measure they could take to improve the health of Kiwis is to stop all vaccination.
Love to New Zealand 🇳🇿