Shirking of Responsibility Encouraged

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 260, 30 July 1937, Page 13

Shirking of Responsibility Encouraged

Sir, —Is not legislation in New Zealand encouraging the shirking of personal responsibility. In many ways, this growing attitude among us is becoming apparent to the thoughtful, who foresee deplorable consequences. To-day, our almost too generous public hospital facilities not only decrease the resistance of many who thus become invalids and develop "the hospital habit, but many are sent to the public hospital who, iu earlier days, would have been cared for at home. The excuse made is that the care is so much more efficient in the public institution. Let us ask the straight question: "Is not responsibilty being t»hirked?” Admitted that a major factor in the excessive increase iu birth control is that babes are being "taxed out of the cradle,” this only partially mitigates the charge that we are becoming a nation which shirks personal responsibility. Now comes the proposal for national insurance, pensions, and free hospitals. The first effect will be to manufacture a Hood of invalids! who would never have succumbed to illness with a need to carry on. Any hospital authority who may' try to protect .the public by keenly scrutinising the admission of "three-parts imagination” patients will be publicly howled down as inhuman. The most sinister effect of national insurance will be the shirking of the care of the aged. We have a tradition that the old mother or father shall never want for a seat at their children’s fire. This has not only been a comfort to those of advanced years, but the responsibility a refining effect on the characters of their children. Is all this to go? Pooh 1 Pooh I the thought-of you will, but we have seen enough of effects to know the distressful reaction will be to send the old people in greater numbers into heartless. institutions, which again will be justified by "more efficient care” —added to which the claim that having paid they are entitled to the service. We shall create national character without sense of personal responsibility and many sore hearts. —I am, etc., OX. Wellington, July 27. . -