Ministers disagree on gas man

Press, 29 February 1984, Page 8

Ministers disagree on gas man

PA Wellington Two Cabinet Ministers stood firm yesterday on their differing views over how the man threatening to set off a canister of nerve gas, Bruce Douglas Cameron, should have been detained. The Minister of Justice, Mr McLay, rejected the claim by the Auckland Hospital Board’s chairman, Dr Frank Rutter, that the courts should not have sent Cameron to Auckland’s Oakley Hospital. Cameron escaped from the hospital after been sent there from Mount Eden prison, where he was remanded on a charge of manufacturing and possessing the hallucinogenic drug, Angel Dust. The Minister of Health, Mr Malcolm, reaffirmed that he was in favour of Dr Rutter’s approach. Mr Malcolm had said earlier that Oakley was not a prison. It ] was there to service the I needs of the mentally ill. ! Prisons needed some sort i of service in which psychiai trists could work, he said. I Mr Malcolm and Mr

McLay will meet the Auckland Hospital Board on Friday to discuss the problem. Mr McLay said that psychiatric hospitals had moved away from the old asylum mode and doctors did not really want those people held in their hospitals. “But contrary to Dr Rutter’s suggestion, Oakley has for many years had a maximum security ward and I am sure that most people agree that it is there that such persons should be held.” Mr McLay said that on two separate occasions three different doctors had certified Cameron as commitable under section 42 of the Mental Health Act, 1969. “While held in Mount Eden Prison Cameron was suicidal. The superintendent has described him to me as

‘bent on self-destruction.’ Clearly the doctors and the courts that twice made orders for his committal took the view that he should be in hospital and not in jail.” The Opposition’s spokesman on health, Dr M. E. R. Bassett, said, “Mr McLay has it right, and Mr Malcolm should bring himself up to date.” Last year’s Committee of Inquiry into Oakley and the death of Michael Percy Watene made it clear that a reconstructed Oakley Hospital, with improved security, could work as Auckland prison’s hospital for the psychiatrically disturbed, Dr Bassett said. Both Ministers should have assurances that adequate security would be provided, he said.