Doctors attack report

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32874, 24 March 1972, Page 3

Doctors attack report

(N.Z. Press Association) WELLINGTON, March 23. “A mouse” and “a piddling kind of report” are how New Zealand’s two medical associations have described the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Social Security. The commission had “laboured mightily and brought forth a mouse as far as recommendations for community health were concerned,” said the chairman of the council of the Medical Association of New Zealand (Dr R. F. Elliott). “We were expecting the commission to produce Ideas for the health services of the next decade, particularly for community health. But the report is not a blueprint for the ’7os and certainly not for the ’Bos. We are back to square one,” he said.

The report was a superb example of the clear and logical putting of a case.

“However, the questions are asked but there are virtually no answers.”

The commission could be certain the Government would not follow all its recommendations, Dr Elliott said. The commission had passed the buck back to the Minister of Health and Social Security.

Dr Elliott said the commission had reached some wrong conclusions—there was no reason for delay in delivering to the community the help needed.

The secretary of the New Zealand Medical Association (Dr E. Geiringer) said it was “a piddling kind of report—the kind of thing you expect some little departmental sub-commit-tee to come up with in the course of reviewing social security benefits.”

The commission should have looked at the broad outlines and principles, and provided some guidelines, some vision, some help to

the Government in taking a new, courageous step into the last part of the 20th century. “If this is all Royal commissions do, one will begin to regard them as Government tools to delay the necessary revision of benefits, which certainly should not have taken three years.” He likened commissions to sausage machines. “They churn up the evidence, take out the bones, add a little of this and that, wrap it up in a. nice cover, and call the result a report of a Royal commission. Any pressure group kicking the Government around for half a year could get that sort of result,” he said. Many of the measures in the report were nevertheless welcome, said Dr Geiringer. “Everyone likes a little extra on the general medical services benefit after 30 years, but the increases are quite insufficient.”