"THAT'S A LIE!"

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 219, 15 September 1943, Page 6

"THAT'S A LIE!"

MEDICAL EARNINGS

SOCIAL SECURITY DOCTORS

"That's a lie, and Dr. Newlands knows it," ejaculated Dr. Martyri Finlay, Labour candidate for Remuera when his attention was drawn by a questioner at the Baptist Hall, Orakei, last night, to a Press Association message from Dunedin in which Dr. W. Newlands, a former member of the Medical Council, was reported to have commented that some medical men had received £10,000 each from the Social Security Funds. Dr. Finlay went on to comment that as secretary to the Minister of Health he knew positively that none of the Social Security doctors were earning anything like £10,000 a year, though some specialists, particularly some of the fashionable specialists in cities like Auckland might be earning that amount. Referring to Dr. Newlands' suggestion that the Social Security doctors were giving "just a hurried service," the candidate said that the lists of the doctors who were working under the capitation scheme were still increasing, which indicated that the patients were well satisfied with the service received. "Not one of these gets anything like £10,000 a year, and Dr. Newlands knows it," he said. He knew Dr. Newlands well, he said, and he was "a shell-backed Tory of the thickest vintage," who was annoyed because he had been replaced on the Medical Council by Mr. Douglas Robb, of Auckland. In answer to another questioner, who asked his opinion of the double payment made by public servants to the Social Security Fund and also to their own superannuation fund, Dr. Finlay said that as a public servant himself, he fully sympathised with the questioner. He thought it was wrong. He considered that eventually the Social Security scheme should take over all superannuation schemes, paying out to the contributors to those schemes. His audience was not to think that social security had reached its peak as far as age benefits were concerned. It was not yet in full operation, and it would probably take ten or twenty years to get into full operation. It was the first and biggest scheme of its type In the world and needed time to develop.

At the conclusion of the meeting, the attendance at which overflowed the hall, Dr. Finlay was accorded a unanimous vote of thanks and confidence.