Plunket Society

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34031, 20 December 1975, Page 14

Plunket Society

Sir, —Why is it that of all the voluntary organisations the Plunket Society is the one that is always grizzling? The constant carping of the Karitane hospital treasurer, Mr P. G. Egden is tiring. As a taxpayer I am well aware that 85 per cent of Plunket’s costs comes, from our pockets. As a father I also know how hard young Plunket mothers work to find the balance to finance a socially ambitious elite hierarchy which has little, if any contact with the mothers themselves. It is time that Mr Egden put his house in order. Other organisations do better on less and he should find out why. — Yours, etc., M. J. DOBSON. December 13, 1975.

|Mr P. G. Egden, honorary treasurer, Christchurch Karitane Hospital, replies: “We ‘grizzle’ because the basic object of the Health Department, under Mr McGuigan, was to socialise Plunket by a devious scheme of withholding normal finance and imposing expensive disciplines. There is no ‘elite hierarchy’ in the society; equality and fraternity abound and there is far more democracy than in any band of neo-socialists. Before Labour, Karitane Christchurch had a surplus of $7OOO — last year a loss of $62,000. It still maintains, by far, the lowest bed cost of all hospitals through the generosity of its thousands of volunteers and benefactors.”]