WAR PENSIONS SYSTEM.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 237, 6 October 1936, Page 6

WAR PENSIONS SYSTEM.

The letter of "H.D.," while written with the best of intentfons to show the pension doctors' attitude, shows nothing but that the system or assessing pensions is, like the war, 20 years behind the times. "H.D." says the pension doctor is obliged to apply to his technical appreciation of a case certain policies, rules and regulations. To the average ex : soldier now in civilian life rules and regulations are a tiling of the past—a man is either fit or sick, and if the latter there must be a cause. If fit he does not need or apply for a pension, but if he is ill there should 'be no difficulty in obtaining one. On the outbreak of the war men who went overseas had to be fit. Insured and classified as first-class lives | prior to the war, and classified 1A during the war, some of these men are now told that their disabilities are not caused by war service! I am informed that in Australia 8000 war pensioners pass away yearly—proof indeed that the average ex-serviceman's ills are directly attributable to vrar service. If an applicant is given the benefit of the doubt I venture to assert that every soldier who had one week's front line experience, not to mention years, should receive a pension, and that without the necessity of applying. At this distant date would as an army medical man, care to classify on pre-war standards as fit for the front line the remnants of, say, the New Zealand division? Every ex-soldier is not an applicant lor a pension, but when war wounded, decorated "Diggers," now pensioners, are discharged from the army unfit, are still listening to the old platitudes about the debt we owe, etc. (and the average ex-"Digger" only gets what he earns), no wonder wo exercise our immemorial (privilege arid "grouse." DINK.