Finance Minister Grant Robertson's claim that any new pay offer to nurses 'would have to be made using funds already allocated, as there's no more” is nonsense.

His understanding of how the money system works is paper thin, and he's relying on what advisers in Treasury are telling him.

Just like Bill English, he puts paying $4.5 billion to the private banks the government has borrowed from ahead of decent pay for doctors and nurses and decent health care for Kiwis.

He could solve the nurses' strike overnight if he understood anything about Labour Party history and took a leaf out of Michael Joseph Savage's book. Savage used the Reserve Bank to create the credit necessary to rebuild the nation.

Five thousand houses were built by 1939, and 30,000 by 1949, financed by Reserve Bank credit.

The European Central Bank is creating credit at the rate of 35 billion Euros per month through its quantitative easing programme without any sign of inflation, so there's no reason our own Reserve Bank couldn't fund our government in a similar way.

That would give Robertson $4.5 billion every year to spend on New Zealanders instead.

Putting bankers ahead of doctors and nurses shows that Labour's economic policies are no different from National's.

T Livingston, Whakamarama (Abridged).