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Cecilia Robinson’s Tend Health Win

Written By: - Date published: 1:10 pm, June 12th, 2025 - 37 comments
Categories: capitalism, Christopher Luxon, health, national, Privatisation, same old national, Shane Reti, simeon brown - Tags: , , , , ,

Opinion and analysis:

In April, I wrote about My Food Bag Co-Founders James and Cecilia Robinson telehealth organisation, Tend, and its chances of securing government contracts.

An industry contact wrote this in response to me at the time [interpretation theirs] –

“Health procurement doesn’t work that way, with mates getting good contracts. There are bigger, government funded cartels out there with established [telehealth] monopolies.

Like PHOs who are absolutely dominating in this space because they’ve had the benefit of more than a decade of government funding to develop telehealth capability and they’re already plugged in to general practice patient management systems…

[They] Tend don’t have the track record for something of that scale on their own. Doesn’t matter how much money they throw at it.”

But those comments were not wholly prescient.

A recent announcement on May 29, confirms that as of 1 July 2025, Tend will be made a formal government “Private Health Organisation” – a desirable, potentially lucrative, and hard to obtain designation that I understand requires multiple levels of approval – including from the Minister of Health himself.

Interestingly, Tend seems to have pulled out of local contracts in the Western Bay of Plenty to “seek a direct contract with Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora.”. Western Bay of Plenty Primary Health Organisation expressed concerns about continuity of care and access to services, but Tend noted it was important to “rapidly increase funding for the front line”. i.e. I’ve interpreted this to mean to themselves.

Health New Zealand contracts Primary Health Organisations (PHOs) to provide primary health services across New Zealand. It’s largely government funded, but can also charge direct patient fees.

The potential for revenue here is hundreds of millions, if not billions of taxpayers’ money – depending on the size of the PHO.

In the past1, PHOs have typically been set up as, or by, not-for-profit trusts, and needed to comply with a series of not-for-profit and community health objectives, amongst other things.

As far as I’m aware, Tend Healthcare is a wholly for-profit, private healthcare corporate that raises capital from investors.

This modifies the landscape from e.g. doctors that run private practices to deliver not-for-profit health goals, to bringing in corporations that may be wholly for-profit, and exist largely to provide investor returns.

The theoretical analogy I can think of here is changing funding from independent grocery stores that supply basics to in-need-communities, to funding Woolworths type outfits – and saying “You’re going to get your groceries faster, don’t worry!” and the smaller stores all gradually capitulate to the new environment & culture.

i.e. The change is subtle at first – but it is significant.

As a reminder, My Food Bag also had a corporate model and that saw Mum and Dad investors lose up to 97% of their investment, but others, such as its founders (including the Robinsons), profited handsomely.

Anyway, Tend has celebrated their PHO status, writing on their website:

Becoming their own PHO marks a significant milestone in Tend’s mission to provide accessible, modern, and patient-centred healthcare. It enables them to streamline funding flows, reduce unnecessary administrative layers, and deliver more coordinated, efficient care across the communities it serves.

Tend says it anticipates their clients to more than double from 80,000 enrolled patients to over 180,000 over the next year.

According to Health NZ’s website, and assuming Tend meets all other requirements, on management fees alone, that could entitle an operator like Tend to a management rate of $610,000 + $7.1244 per person over 75,000 enrolees, if I’m reading it correctly.

PS

Others familiar with the health sector mechanics and funding models may be better placed to parse the above further than I but regardless, a significant health privatisation milestone worth noting.

Excerpted from: Short Term At All Costs

37 comments on “Cecilia Robinson’s Tend Health Win ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. tc 1
    12 June 2025 at 2:33 pm

    Little surprise they look happy, easy money suckers. Collins just smiles and waves like the good old days.

  2. Patricia Bremner 2
    12 June 2025 at 4:02 pm

    Yes, thanks Mountain Tui. This makes me reflect on Whale Oil Collins and Nicky Hager's "Dirty Politics" and "The Hollow Men" . I think I will read them again.

  3. feijoa 3
    12 June 2025 at 4:43 pm

    Yeah, well, I worked through COVID as an Allied health practitioner using telehealth. It is just NOT the same as hands on healthcare.

    You can't touch /palpate anything for starters. Take their blood pressure, bloods, do a smear, check the prostate, pop on an ECG, the list goes on.

    And there are all the subtleties of human communication that get lost in a video call, which could, in fact, be vital.

    It is C grade healthcare IMHO. Health for the poors.

    • Mountain Tui 3.1
      12 June 2025 at 10:01 pm

      It's the direction National are taking us in.

      I've previously written about how Luxon was boasting about the telehealth future on Newstalk ZB, in ways that showed neither he nor Mike Hosking understood what they were talking about, in my opinion.

  4. PsyclingLeft.Always 4
    12 June 2025 at 7:37 pm

    Aye Mountain Tui, still exposing the grifters ! Esp this connection with the My Food Bag Pyramid Seller Entrepeneurs James and Cecilia Robinson. Who would have known they would segue into Tele Health?

    Well them of course. Grifters always on the search for the easy money.

    And jeez I looked at the Board. dame Theresa Gattung? Have previous knowledge of her…and telecom !

    The Marko guy, dont know of him…see he was Infratil for years….

    Any Info?

    Anyway, seems its the new gold mine.

    OUR Gold, but.

    • Mountain Tui 4.1
      12 June 2025 at 10:02 pm

      Hi PsyclingLeft.Always

      I didn't delve further into the Board members, but have had some tips on the overall background.

      • PsyclingLeft.Always 4.1.1
        12 June 2025 at 10:28 pm

        Hi MT. re other Board members…yep theres probably only so much more anyone would need to know about these types.

        With this new Tend scheme I'm put in mind of that old adage reappropriated.

        "There's no gain without pain" . Theirs…and ours.

        Look after, MT.

  5. feijoa 5
    12 June 2025 at 10:51 pm

    Oh

    And I'll tell you another problem about Telehealth

    The technology. You know, poor people might have Windows 7 or something……

    Or, it doesn't work on a Mac, or whatever. The tech problems are endless, especially people/places with old computers that don't connect to the latest wizz that Tend have.

    Just another barrier to healthcare.

    Are the medical profession silent on this bullshit?

  6. bwaghorn 6
    13 June 2025 at 6:25 am

    Hope it works to be honest as every government of the last 20 years has absolutely failed on rural health, we still get it but only just, I'm a fan of a ph consult I've actually had the same dr 3 times in a row , which hasn't happened for years, and it's convenient,

  7. Res Publica 7
    13 June 2025 at 7:37 am

    Thanks for this sharp and timely analysis. As someone who used to work in the PHO space prior to the Te Whatu Ora reforms, I want to build on some of your points about how structural dynamics in the primary care system are changing. And in some ways, being exposed.

    While it’s true that PHOs have benefited from long-term government funding and integration with GP systems, this hasn’t created a cohesive or equitable system. In fact, there are serious design flaws baked into the current funding and delivery model that have left the sector ripe for disruption: whether by Tend or anyone else.

    Capitation: Built for Simplicity, Not Equity

    Primary care is still largely funded via capitation, a model that assumes each enrolled patient will need about three consults per year. That might average out across a population—but it doesn’t reflect the real-world needs of people with long-term conditions, complex health profiles, or chronic mental health issues.

    The result is financial pressure on practices serving high-needs communities, and a subtle incentive to “cherry-pick” healthier patients who require fewer visits. Some patients are quietly turned away. Others are redlined into the handful of practices willing—or resourced—to manage them.

    Back in my time, the PHO had to step in to take over a financially failing practice directly, then got lumped with all of the patients the other practices in town turned away.

    PHOs Are Funded Like Public Entities, But Built on Private Models

    PHOs operate in a strange middle ground. They pool public funding, but rely on independent GP businesses to deliver care. These practices are private entities: they can choose their software, set their policies, and open or close their books at will. They’re not directly accountable to the public—or to Te Whatu Ora—despite handling essential services.

    That has made meaningful coordination difficult. PHOs have limited levers to drive change, improve equity, or even implement basic standards across their networks.

    Fragmented Health IT: A National Liability

    Despite more than a decade of digital health strategies and public investment, there is still no unified approach to health IT infrastructure. Practice Management Systems (PMSs) are a patchwork. Data standards are inconsistent. Even in recent years, some GPs have used Gmail to send referrals, which are printed off at public hospitals and manually entered into physical scheduling books.

    This level of fragmentation isn’t just inefficient—it’s dangerous. And it severely limits our ability to deliver coordinated, patient-centred care at a regional or national level.

    The GP Workforce is Aging Out

    New Zealand’s GP workforce is aging rapidly, with many approaching retirement. But general practice is no longer attracting new doctors in the numbers we need. Younger clinicians are choosing hospital specialties, moving overseas, or avoiding general practice altogether due to high administrative burdens and low margins.

    We are heading toward a workforce cliff, and the system is doing little to prepare for it.

    The Mania for Telehealth

    The current mania for telehealth isn’t being driven by evidence of better patient outcomes. It’s being driven by cost-containment pressures. Virtual consults are cheaper to provide, require less physical infrastructure, and can be scaled quickly.

    But for many patients, especially those with complex needs, language barriers, digital exclusion, or mental health issues, telehealth is no substitute for in-person care.

    There’s a real risk that digital convenience is being used as a cover for systemic withdrawal from high-touch, relationship-based primary care, especially in communities where it’s most needed.

    So What Does Tend Represent?

    Tend’s new PHO status is significant—but not just because it represents creeping privatisation. It matters because it exposes the vacuum at the heart of primary care: underfunded, under-coordinated, and failing to meet modern patient expectations.

    If Tend succeeds, it will be because it stepped into a space that successive governments have been either unwilling or unable to reform for decades.

    And yes. It will also be because its founders had mates in the current government who were all too eager to believe the old neoliberal myth: that private = good and public = bad. That leg up shouldn’t be ignored.

    We’re not watching a well-functioning public system being replaced. We’re watching a neglected one being quietly handed over to a corporate actor in the hope that the profit motive will fix what political will would not.

    • weka 7.1
      13 June 2025 at 9:49 am

      the other problem with the PHO model is that you are tied into one GP/practice and will pay more to go somewhere else if you are on a CSC. This makes accessing appropriate care harder eg getting second opinions, or seeing a particular GP who has a speciality.

      PHOs operate in a strange middle ground. They pool public funding, but rely on independent GP businesses to deliver care. These practices are private entities: they can choose their software, set their policies, and open or close their books at will. They’re not directly accountable to the public—or to Te Whatu Ora—despite handling essential services.

      can GPs/GP practices operate as for-profit?

      • Res Publica 7.1.1
        13 June 2025 at 10:58 am

        can GPs/GP practices operate as for-profit?

        They can and do; albeit subsidized by public funds via capitation.

        Theoretically, a GP could choose to opt out of the PHO network entirely.

        On the negative side, they wouldn't receive funding. But on the positive, they could charge whatever they like and be subject to far lower reporting requirements and less oversight.

    • Mountain Tui 7.2
      13 June 2025 at 11:16 am

      Res Publica

      This is incredibly helpful and the analysis we need – thank you very much.

  8. Ad 8
    13 June 2025 at 9:23 am

    Well we're quickly heading for $1 of every $10 in our budget going to health expenditure. It's exploding as we're living longer. The private sector is providing this technology much faster than the public sector – and I just wouldn't trust the public sector to implement this kind of system. Would anyone really?

    The last government chucked massive volumes of new cash into the public system and the improvements were only minimal in many treatment areas like mental health availability.

    So I'm not opposed to some consults being on line. Though I accept Feijoa's points that there's limits. We do need to accept things being done more efficiently since we're running out of physical doctors.

    Engaging on screens is what we do now and it's far easier than the time and expense of driving in, finding and paying for a park.

    Even worse if you've already got an injury that makes it hard to travel at all, or there's very little public transport. We need to be real that physical consults also have limitations for actual patients.

    • weka 8.1
      13 June 2025 at 9:53 am

      I'm a fan of Ka Ora, who provide after hours GP telehealth for people in rural areas without afterhours medical care. It's not without it's limitations, but it's still useful. Not having to travel is a big part of it for me, and also being able to do consults in the evenings/weekends.

      Active triaging solves the issue of people who need face to face care not being siloed into telehealth. That should be a requirement of the contract.

      We could be doing so much more on health promotion and prevention, which would help solve a number of the pressures around staffing and high tech costs.

      • Ad 8.1.1
        13 June 2025 at 10:45 am

        Great to hear it working for you.

        I can easily imagine a long term chronic patient having in-home blood diagnosis, and firing the result off by email to the doctors, and staying rested in their own bed with drips etc. That's the best place for them.

        Of course telehealth is no replacement for injury like A&E. Or indeed births – from Wanaka there's plenty that get helicoptered out every month for complexities.

    • Res Publica 8.2
      13 June 2025 at 11:10 am

      I think a big part of the problem is where we choose to invest that health dollar.

      We keep throwing more and more money at a literal ambulance at the bottom of a metaphorical cliff. i.e. hospitals. They’re politically visible, often in crisis, and easy to rally support around.

      But from a health system perspective, they’re a financial black hole. The return on investment is shockingly low.

      By contrast, primary care gives you four to five times more value per dollar. Keeping people well and out of hospital in the first place is far cheaper and more effective. But it’s less tangible, less politically sexy, and often resisted by the profession when reforms feel top-down or target-driven.

      If you think the PPTA is a strong union, just you wait until you try tangling with RNZGP.

      So, it’s neglected.

      It’s the same dynamic we see in justice: prisons cost a fortune, but prevention and rehabilitation, while still expensive, are much cheaper and more effective.

      The trouble is, as Malcolm Sparrow points out, interventions designed to stop things from happening often struggle to gain traction: precisely because they succeed quietly. If a program works, there’s no crisis, no surge, no catastrophe to respond to. Just... nothing happening.

      And that makes it politically and institutionally hard to sustain.

      Nobody wins votes on someone not getting sick. Or not going to jail.

      • Mountain Tui 8.2.1
        13 June 2025 at 11:17 am

        Fully agree with you Res.

      • weka 8.2.2
        13 June 2025 at 2:33 pm

        hmm, isn't that a communications issue? If primary care is more cost efficient, then solving the GP shortage would have to be a vote winner, but also tying health promotion into community engagement. It looks like a funding prioritising issue too, hard to create community health when you have big hospital waiting lists. This is a decades long solution, not something in a 3 year term. Vision and leadership?

        • Res Publica 8.2.2.1
          13 June 2025 at 4:00 pm

          You're absolutely right — it's a communications issue.

          but I’d argue it's also fundamentally a political one. As I mentioned earlier, and as Malcolm Sparrow points out, investing in things that prevent problems — rather than reacting to them — is incredibly hard to sustain.

          Success looks like nothing happening. And that’s a tough sell in a three-year political cycle.

          What we desperately need is a long-term, multi-generational consensus on health, backed by sustained investment in primary care and community health. That means funding upstream interventions — not just crisis response — and recognising that real health reform doesn’t fit neatly inside an electoral term.

          It also means finally getting serious about a unified national approach to health data and IT: one that delivers a single, seamless, joined-up system where care is coordinated and information flows with the patient. It's going to mean letting go of some long-held traditional views on data, and require clinicians to finally relinquish their death grip on patient information.

          And if that requires nationalising GP services to make it happen? At this point, maybe we should be brave enough to have that conversation.

          • weka 8.2.2.1.1
            13 June 2025 at 9:32 pm

            Success looks like nothing happening. And that’s a tough sell in a three-year political cycle.

            Yes, but that's what I meant by a communications issue.

            The main criticism I have of Labour (apart from the whole neoliberal thing) is that they practice top down governing, and they don't engage with the citizens of NZ. You can't communicate effectively from above. You also can't judge what is going to work (hence the 3 waters and co-governance fails). Communication to the government means telling people stuff, whereas I'm talking about listening and talking with and engagement.

            It also means finally getting serious about a unified national approach to health data and IT: one that delivers a single, seamless, joined-up system where care is coordinated and information flows with the patient. It's going to mean letting go of some long-held traditional views on data, and require clinicians to finally relinquish their death grip on patient information.

            We're already losing privacy rights in health. Having one system to rule them all sounds great from a management pov, but it sucks from a patient rights perspective.

            Remember Bill English's Big Data plans and how the last National government was targeting beneficiaries and pulling funding from groups that wouldn't hand over client data? The government, at this point at least, can't be trusted (neither a Nat nor Lab govt).

            I'm assuming it's conceivable to create the kind of system you describe that also protects patient rights, I just don't see much value placed on that politically and the systems we are getting are more and more cavalier about information and privacy.

            • Res Publica 8.2.2.1.1.1
              13 June 2025 at 11:21 pm

              We're already losing privacy rights in health. Having one system to rule them all sounds great from a management pov, but it sucks from a patient rights perspective.

              I get the concern. But we need to be careful not to confuse bad politics with bad tech.

              I work on systems that handle sensitive information every day. We already know how to build secure, scalable platforms that respect individual privacy and uphold Māori data sovereignty.

              This isn’t speculative. It’s not sci-fi. It’s not even especially difficult. When it’s guided by the right values and solid engineering practice.

              The real issue isn’t code. It’s leadership. Or more accurately, the lack of it.

              Big decisions get made by people who don’t understand the technology, and then those decisions get derailed by political panic, interference, or shifting agendas. That’s how we end up with bloated, dysfunctional projects that lose public trust and deliver little value.

              But we shouldn’t give up.

              Because a unified, people-centred national health IT system isn’t just possible: it’s essential.

              And it’s not just about management dashboards and back-end efficiency. Imagine walking into any hospital or clinic and the clinician treating you has immediate access to your full, accurate medical history — not some incomplete, out-of-date “shared care” record held together with bailing twine and good intentions (when it gets updated at all).

              This isn’t about abstract convenience. It’s about faster diagnoses, safer prescribing, and more coordinated care. It’s about not having to re-explain your trauma to every new provider. It’s about fairness — because disjointed systems hurt the most vulnerable patients the most.

              I know there’s irony in a data engineer advocating for technocracy. But in this case, some competent technical stewardship isn’t a threat to democracy: it’s part of the solution.

              Because what we’re building isn’t just software.

              It’s democratic infrastructure. And we need to treat it with the seriousness, care, and participation that demands.

              • weka …
                13 June 2025 at 11:39 pm

                It doesn't sound democratic to me, although I can see the benefits. One of the first things is that the system will naturally bend towards what is efficient and desirable for the system. This already happens. It’s a function of the system (not the tech), and derives from not using patient centred models.

                Because a unified, people-centred national health IT system isn’t just possible: it’s essential.

                Have you considered the ways in which this would work against the person needing to access health services?

                • weka …
                  13 June 2025 at 11:42 pm

                  to dig into the detail a bit. If the data system is nationwide and unified, how does the patient control who has access to the information?

                  Would it just be hospitals and GPs? Or physios, mental health, MSD, ACC?

                  Is the development involving patient rights organisations? Or patients?

                  • Res Publica …
                    14 June 2025 at 8:05 am

                    I mean, this is entirely theoretical.

                    But I'd expect if you were going to build something like this, you'd absolutely involve patients' rights organizations and solicit feedback from patients themselves.

                    And with the right data architecture and security model you could easily control who has access to what.

                    • weka …
                      14 June 2025 at 9:33 am

                      whereas in my long experience, I fully expect actual patients to not be engaged with. I would expect the HDC and Privacy Commissioner's office to be involved, and on a good day, maybe some NGOs?

                • Res Publica …
                  14 June 2025 at 8:07 am

                  Have you considered the ways in which this would work against the person needing to access health services?

                  In my experience, and that of my friends who are clinicians, is that the lack of timely access to patient data literally kills people.

                  For example, if you're an ED nurse you could have a patient rock up in severe distress but have no access to any of their records or a list of the medications they're on.

                  • weka …
                    14 June 2025 at 9:58 am

                    In my experience, and that of my friends who are clinicians, is that the lack of timely access to patient data literally kills people.

                    Right. So here we have the conflict between the needs of those people (the ones at risk of death and the clinicians) and the needs of people who don't want their health information shared broadly.

                    Currently, privacy law says you can share private information unless you have reason to believe that person who the information is about wouldn't want that eg GPs will share information with other GPs, but not with a family member. But some patients might not even want the information shared with other GPs, and where is the onus to determine what the patient wants? It's mostly not on the GP.

                    Some examples:

                    A woman has an abortion, via Family Planning, but doesn't want her GP to know because he's also Catholic and a family friend and she will feel awkward with him knowing.

                    A woman has a history of psych evaluation from some years ago for serious depression. She currently has extreme periods where she vomits a lot and sometimes ends up in A & E due to dehydration. Staff at A & E read her medical history and think she's got some psychosomatic issues or hysteria/psych issues and don't treat her properly. That's a real life story, but attitudes like that are not uncommon towards women. Likewise people in recovery with former histories of drug abuse needing to access pain relief for other reasons.

                    And with the right data architecture and security model you could easily control who has access to what.

                    Conceptually I can see this. But in real life there are a number barriers:

                    1. that it's technically feasible.
                    2. that the health information system (people) supports this and it is designed in from a patient rights pov
                    3. you need ways of dealing with the outliers

                    for instance, you could set up a system where everything is locked to specific providers only, and can only be opened to specified others, on explicit permission from the patient. With the proviso that if they are unconscious and needing life saving or disability preventing care, that can be overriden.

                    So the woman whose had an abortion won't have her information shared with her GP unless she gives specific permission. Assuming that 1) she hasn't already given carte blanche access and 2) the abortion provider thinks to ask her what she wants to do or she realises this is an issue for her and organises the sharing to be switched off. That's complex.

                    So while I see that all as theoretically possible (assuming the tech works), I'm not convinced that any government is even close to being willing to give patients this degree of privacy and control.

                    • weka …
                      14 June 2025 at 10:00 am

                      National won't do it because of the cost. Labour won't do it because Nanny knows best.

                    • weka …
                      14 June 2025 at 10:14 am

                      what might convince me to be more proactively supportive would be the people that want to do this pre-emptively having a broad awareness of patient rights issues and automatically including that in the debate 👍 Not as an add on, but as core to the idea.

                    • Res Publica …
                      14 June 2025 at 10:18 am

                      shrug

                      I'm not claiming that any government, of any stripe, is ready to move on this. And Te Whatu Ora certainly won’t take the initiative on its own.

                      But the reason we don’t have patient-directed, fine-grained control over health data isn’t technical. It’s political.

                      We already have the architecture, access controls, and security models to let people decide who sees what — with clear consent pathways, emergency overrides, and sensible defaults. We could build a system that actually respects patient agency.

                      Where someone’s abortion, mental health history, or recovery from addiction doesn’t silently follow them from clinic to clinic, colouring every interaction. Where privacy isn’t a back-office compliance checkbox, but an expression of trust and autonomy embedded in design.

                      And it wouldn’t even need to be that expensive. Health IT is only so expensive because of institutional inertia, political risk aversion, and a persistent refusal to build and trust technical capacity within Te Whatu Ora. Instead, we keep outsourcing, overcomplicating, and under-delivering — while pretending that “it’s just too hard.”

                      It’s not. The cost isn’t in the tech. It’s in our unwillingness to do things differently.

                    • weka []
                      14 June 2025 at 10:29 am

                      quite, that’s pretty much what I just said. It’s government politics and health system politics that stop any kind of patient centred approach.

                      I’m also saying that in order to get a good technical system, it requires engaging with the perceived problems. You say that it’s possible, I don’t know if it is because I’m not seeing that worked through. How does A & E save someone’s life? How does the women who doesn’t want her abortion information shared prevent that? How

                      I’m a fan of good tech. I use telehealth and am signed up to access my health information online. Because of both of those I know the existing holes in privacy protection. Because I’m not a geek, I can’t see the how of the solutions.

  9. weka 9
    13 June 2025 at 9:46 am

    Things I would want to know:

    What fees is Tend charging? Are they the same as government subsidised fees in GP clinics?

    Does Tend use an active triaging system? This is where patients who need direct, face to face care can be redirected. Lots of people don't need that and do well with telehealth.

    I've used Ka Ora a bit, it's available after hours to people who live in rural areas with no adequate after hours care available. I like it because it means I don't have to drive to town. I pay the same community services card rate as I do at my GP clinic, I don't get penalised for having a GP consult that is outside the PHO I am registered with.

    Beyond that, I agree there is a big issue with setting up for-profit services that are accessing public funding. I'm not clear if GPs operate as not for profit though.

    • Res Publica 9.1
      13 June 2025 at 11:00 am

      I'm not clear if GPs operate as not for profit though.

      Some do. Others don't.

      For example, in my area there are 3 or 4 corporate practices owned by the likes of White Cross, a bunch of smaller and independent GPs, and a couple operated as not for profits by the local iwi.

  10. Tricledrown 10
    13 June 2025 at 3:00 pm

    Vulture capitalism making sure the ruling class make the rest of us tennants in our own country

    [lprent: Responding to moderation is not an optional activity.
    Reminding you of https://thestandard.org.nz/it-has-been-a-long-week-for-casey-costello/#comment-1987764 ]