A difficult balancing act for flamingos, ministers
As ACC tells us, about 30% of people aged 65 and over who live in the community will fall at least once a year and 10% to 20% will need hospitalisation.
We old people are bombarded with information about improving our balance.
I have become adept at standing on one foot in the shower like a misshapen flamingo in a deluge.
Mr Google tells me this behaviour in flamingos is believed to help them conserve body heat and energy, particularly when it is cold.
Also, this posture can form part of a courtship display. Please do not regurgitate your porridge imagining such scenes in my bathroom. They are not a happening thing.
There is already enough of a risk of an ACC claim when I try the creme-de-la-creme of this exercise, standing on one leg with your eyes shut.
My pathetic attempts at this prove I am not a flamingo, misshapen or otherwise. Those fine birds happily sleep while maintaining their unipedal posture.
I cannot do that exercise where you cross your ankles, drop to the floor and get up again without using your arms or knees either, flopping about with all the elegance of an albatross walking.
If that condemns me to an earlier-than-expected grave, as some commentators on the importance of this seem to be suggesting, so be it.
I could be following the ACC Nymbl programme, designed to help the over-50s stay on their feet. It combines body movements and brain games, but it is an app only downloadable to a smartphone or a tablet. I have neither.
And no ACC, please do not suggest joining an exercise group. It would be irresponsible of you to have me reliving the traumatic days of unco-ordinated blundering about in physical education in my straining-at-the seams rompers.
All is not lost though. I can do more sit-to-stand repeats (where you sit on a chair with your arms crossed on your chest and see how many times you can stand up and sit down in 30 seconds) than the average for a person my age, according to the United States public health agency the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost twice as many.
Not that I am skiting. I am, after all, the woman who broke her wrist after slipping on bedding when I was changing the sheets a few years back.
While I may be inconsistent about exercising, and a little confused about balance requirements, that's nothing compared with the baffling use of the balance buzz word from government ministers.
Among them was Environment Minister Penny Simmonds telling us the balance had swung too far towards environmental protection at the cost of not being able to get things done.
"We consider there does need to be a rebalancing," she said.
"Not a disregard of the environment, but a rebalancing."
But when a public health researcher and freshwater advocate wondered on what basis Ms Simmonds had made this statement, she was advised the minister had not been provided with any specific advice or evidence from any agency. Accordingly, the Official Information Act request from the researcher was refused because the requested information did not exist.
More recently, in the same vein, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay told us the government wants to restore "balance in how fresh water is managed across the country and ensuring the interests of all water users, including farmers ... are properly reflected".
It's all part of the planned overhaul of resource management which we are assured will continue to protect the environment even as regulation is reduced.
Are we expected to believe the balance has swung too far towards environmental protection when so many of our waterways are unswimmable, undrinkable and too murky to properly reflect much? If current regulations for managing freshwater have not made the improvement we would like yet, and they are supposedly too stringent, how will weaker rules work?
Last week Associate Education Minister David Seymour announced a review of early childhood education (ECE) funding aimed at ensuring it is simple, fair and gets value for money. Great.
But hard on the heels of the pay equity debacle, many in the sector will be feeling uneasy the review group's brief includes advising on "the balance between quality and affordability for services and parents/caregivers reflected in the funding system, including its contribution to an appropriate mix of minimum standards and quality inputs, such as adult-to-child ratios or proportions of qualified teachers".
Should quality really be battling it out with cost, and if it loses, who will be advantaged? Not our tamariki.
Have our government ministers been spending too much time playing ostriches in ECE sandpits, reinforcing the myth about the birds' behaviour? That's what I call unbalanced.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
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