NO REAL CHANGES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 3, 4 July 1938, Page 11

NO REAL CHANGES

PRINCIPLES OF BILL

MR. SAVAGE'S FINAL WORD

A final reply was made today by the Prime Minister (the Rt. Hon. M. J. Savage), in an interview, to the protests of Dr. J. P. S. Jamieson president of the New Zealand branch of the British Madical Association, that (the Government had refused to take the medical profession into its confidence regarding the social security proposals. Mr. Savage said that there was nothing likely to be in the Bill that Dr. Jamieson was not already aware of. There would be ao alteration whatsoever in the principles of the scheme. It was just a. question of working out in legal shape what had been put before the Parliamentary Committee which considered the proposals. The B.M.A. had had the same right to make representations as other sections of the community.

"Long before that Parliamentary Committee sat the B.M.A. had the right to appear before Dr. McMillan's committee," said Mr. Savage. "They gave evidence collectively and individually, and they were interviewed all over the country by Dr.*McMillan; I don't know of any occasion when any section of the community got greater consideration than the B.M.A. in this connection. .

"I would say quite definitely that Dr. Jamieson is turning this into political propaganda. I am not concerned with that at the moment, but I am concerned with providing a service for the people," Mr. Savage added. "So far as this controversy is concerned it is ended. I am not carrying the wrangle any further. The representatives of the. people in Parliament will have to decide the rest, and after that is over the people will decide it for themselves at the poll. If they don't want it they will know what to do with the Government."