Arendal (Dockbladet): The Conservatives walked out on Dokbladet this evening and said Labor had lost credibility for its promises on aging policy.
Don Tren, the Conservative Party’s spokesman for health policy, pointed to figures the party extracted from Statistics Norway showing the number of nursing homes in six major cities fell during Labor’s time in power.
Now Labor is hitting back and believes the figures are misleading, but the whole move is without merit.
– I feel sorry for the local politicians. They are now completely desperate. They are vulnerable when Conservative leaders use them in a game to win big cities. Cecile Mirseth, Labour’s spokeswoman for health policy, says it is “disrespectful”.
Stavanger: – Statistics are wrong
Labor has been given a short window of time by Docbladet to respond to the Conservative attack and no time to scrutinize the numbers. In the evening and hours before the NRK debate, several large cities isolated by the Conservative Party showed other figures.
Dag Mossige, head of the Labor Party’s group in Stavanger, said in an e-mail to Dagbladet that the Conservative Party cited Norway as saying that 120 nursing homes had not disappeared.
On the contrary, it has become net Many Places.
– If you take Oslo out of Hoyer’s calculation, there would be 55 more nursing homes – and take Oslo out of the equation, Mirseth says, explaining further:
– Oslo has capacity in nursing homes. They plan well for the needs of the population and have elaborate plans for both construction and rehabilitation of old age homes.
Right: – No evidence
Høyre’s Tone Trøen points out that the figures are taken from Open Statistics Norway.
– Mayors cannot be disqualified from pointing out the decline of nursing homes in their municipalities. I fail to see that the Labor Party has presented a factual basis for its claims. The government itself describes the need for 34 per cent more care places by 2025 than in 2017.
Both Dagbladet and the Labor Party had access to the Statistics Norway figures before Trøen’s attack was published.
– Politics at its worst
But the figure of a net reduction of 426 nursing homes in Norway is not just wrong, according to the Labor Party, it is very wrong.
That makes Cecile Mirceth have strong words.
– It is bad politics when false statistics are used by a national politician to create false representation targeting local politicians. They see their municipality being dragged through the mud without identifying the numbers based on the information they have and local investments, Mirseth says.
Labour’s health summit now wants the local election campaign to take a different path, avoiding harsh attacks by national politicians on local politicians.
– Election campaign should be taken in a different direction. I hope Conservative leaders will avoid manipulating numbers to attack local candidates in the future.
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