Labour leader Chris Hipkins has felt the love in Dunedin, visiting the well-known Love Shack student flat and announcing more places at Otago Medical School.

Labour has promised to lift the number of places at medical school by 95 a year each year next term.

Two of the students in the flat were dentistry students and asked Hipkins how he was going to get the workforce to enable free dental care for under-30s. Hipkins said there was significant funding for training more students.

Meanwhile, National leader Christopher Luxon is visiting a factory and small businesses in south Auckland.

Luxon donned his high-vis and safety glasses for a visit to the Cemix cement factory in Onehunga.

The National leader got a warm reception at the factory but was challenged by one employee: “Are you going to win this thing?”

”We are,” Luxon said. “This country … is heading in the wrong direction at the moment and we’re going to turn it around.”

”Well, I’ve got my money on you,” the employee said.

The new medical places announced by Labour, plus the 50 announced earlier this year, means 335 additional places will be available each year by 2027, bringing the total trained each year to 874 by 2027.

Labour’s announcement just pips National’s promise to lift train 759 doctors a year by 2030.

National’s promise centres around creating a third med school at the University of Waikato, which would eventually offer 120 places a year. National also promised to increase places at Otago and Auckland med schools by 50 a year.

Labour will not create a third medical school, instead relying on lifting places at Auckland and Otago.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins made the announcement in Dunedin this morning, and said the promise was a “a 62 per cent increase over current levels.

“This starts with the additional 50 doctors places a year the Labour Government announced as part of New Zealand’s Health Workforce Plan and adds 95 more each year for three years to bring the total amount of doctors trained yearly to 874,” Hipkins said.

The policy will phase in over the next term of Parliament, costing $62m over the forecast period and eventually costing $32m a year by 2027.

National’s plan has a capital cost to the Crown of $280m and an ongoing annual cost of $26.2m a year from 2026/27.

Labour Health spokeswoman Ayesha Verrall said Labour would also deliver 700 extra nursing places in 2024, a promise announced in the most recent Government budget.

“Our health workers have done more for New Zealanders than people will ever know, holding the system together not just through Covid, but for years preceding due to years of neglect and underinvestment,” Verrall said.

“Since 2017 we immediately sought to turn that around, and despite the pandemic we are making good progress. We’ve increased the top of the nurses’ salary scale by almost $40,000 from $66,000 to $103,000, we now have 4800 more nurses, 1800 more doctors, and 700 more psychologists,” she said.

“We’ve launched a massive rebuild programme to improve our hospitals, build new ones, and upgrade our health infrastructure,” she said.

Luxon said the policy for training more doctors was not credible or believable.

”We are 31 days out from an election and they have only just worked out that we have a health workforce crisis in New Zealand.”

National has promised an extra 225 doctors a year from 2030 by establishing a third medical school at the University of Waikato.

Luxon said the new medical school was a four year programme and many of the doctors would be trained in regional New Zealand. That meant the doctors were more likely to remain in rural areas where shortages were acute.

Luxon did not directly answer a question about how he would address the chokepoint for graduates needing hospital placements, but said National would open up immigration settings to build the overall workforce.