We reporters stare down from our third-floor enclave at the two vacant lots which will one day — hopefully — be filled by what will be a brand new, state-of-the-art public hospital and associated health precinct.
Except huge doubts remain over the future of the new Dunedin Hospital, despite Health Minister Andrew Little’s increasingly terse assurances that the still-to-be-built facility will meet the current and future health needs of the people of Otago and Southland.
Resource consent has been granted for the outpatient building, and work on its foundations and piles is well under way.
So far, so good ... but considerable doubt remains over just what will finally be built on the site of the former Cadbury factory.
We know what should be built there, thanks to the exhaustive and exhausting process that all major public construction projects go through.
After several iterations of the new hospital were proposed at various stages of the business case planning formula that such new builds must pass before being signed off, Cabinet agreed to spend $1.2 billion on the aforementioned five-storey outpatient building and a seven-storey inpatient building, the two to be linked together by bridges over St Andrew St.
Except it rapidly became apparent that $1.23 billion was not going to be enough money ... the budget was increased to $1.47 billion, even before the rapid rise of inflation and in the cost of building supplies, and no-one connected with the project believes for a second that that amount will suffice.
More concerning for the future ill and injured of Otago and Southland — although a Dunedin hospital, it is expected that patients from throughout the southern region will use the facility, as they use the current fast-declining hospital now — is just what services will be on offer.
The final stage of the capital budget process is the drafting and sign-off of a detailed business case which, in this situation, was supposed to be the final iteration of what specialties and services would be offered in the new hospital, how many beds it would have and how many operating theatres.
This was already a fraught exercise — planners tried to excise some services and reduce the proposed size of the building, schemes which were robustly contested when the doctors, nurses and other workers who will have to work in the building were asked for their two cents worth.
But it has become even more fraught in recent months as the bean counters, alarmed at just where the actual cost of the detailed business case might end up, embarked upon a ‘‘value management exercise’’ — an enterprise we only know the details of thanks to some kind soul leaking the Te Whatu Ora Southern response to the exercise to the ODT.
To slice a fairly substantial document down to one paragraph, proposed cuts to the hospital include reducing wards, losing beds and operating theatres, and not building some of the proposed complex at all, including one of the connecting bridges ... and Te Whatu Ora replied that doing so would likely end up being more expensive in the long run and pose a grave danger of the new hospital being as unfit for purpose as the old one.
These details emerged in October, but since then the silence from Te Whatu Ora — the infrastructure committee of its board has yet to recommend to the new national health body what it should do — and the Health minister, has been deafening.
Mr Little has at least said if any cuts are proposed he must be consulted first although that, of course, does not guarantee that he would oppose them.
The value management exercise has delayed the lodging of the resource consent for the inpatient building, which is somewhat ironic given it was approved last year as eligible for fast-track consenting.
While Te Whatu Ora vacillates, the price of cost of the new hospital is only going in one direction, and the longer it takes to get a final price from the successful tendering contractor the higher it will get.
There are political perils aplenty for both Labour and National here.
Mr Little and the local Labour MPs are more than happy to pose in front of the diggers and cranes to mark construction milestones but, in general, have been reluctant to throw up the barricades to defend the new hospital from those trying to pare it back to something more akin to a medical centre.
In a recent Budget debate Dunedin National list MP Michael Woodhouse challenged his local Labour rivals to speak out: both Taieri MP Ingrid Leary and Dunedin list MP Rachel Brooking spoke later in the debate but pointedly avoided the topic.
Not that Mr Woodhouse can cruise unruffled on this issue ... when asked about the new Dunedin Hospital a fortnight ago his party leader Chris Luxon deferred to Mr Woodhouse to answer the question, rather than issue a rallying cry of his own to promise that the new buildings would be built as promised.
That would partly be because National will not want to commit to a price tag which is blank at present, but also because it has next year’s election in mind.
It has already had to wind back some of its economic policy, particularly in the tax area, as latest Treasury projects have suggested they would be unsustainable.
National wants to win back provincial seats such as Tukituki, Nelson, Whangarei (which last week had its hospital rebuild announced by Mr Little), Rangitata and New Plymouth, all of which have hospitals in lesser or greater need of repair or rebuilding: it will want to make voter-enticing promises, but at the same time it cannot pledge to spend cash which might not be available.