HOSPITAL TAXES

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVII, Issue 112, 8 April 1927, Page 6

HOSPITAL TAXES

SYSTEM OF MAINTENANCE. NEW ZEALAND METHOD PRAISED • Mrs Stranger, of Melbourne, who, with Mr Stranger, is visiting New Zealand, and who yesterday visited the Palmerston North Hospital under the guidance of Mrs L. A. Abraham, has nothing but praise for the Dominion’s system of hospital maintennaee. As a prominent hospital auxiliary worker in connection with the Melbourne Alfred Hospital, Mrs Stranger is keenly interested in matters affecting such institutions and has visited a number while touring New Zealand. “What so favourably impresses me about your hospital system in New Zealand is the mode of maintenance whereby the requisite sum is raised by taxation and Government subsidy,” Mrs Stranger told a “Standard” reporter. She explained . that in Melbourne, and as far as she was aware throughout Australia, hospital maintenance depended in a large degree upon the voluntary contributions of the public. The Government .made a grant to each hospital, but it usually did not exceed two-thirds of the amount required to maintain the institution and, there being no- local taxation, the public were called upon to voluntarily subscribe the rest. *The hospital auxiliaries, with one of which she was connected, dealt with the problem of raising the funds or of securing gifts in kind to afford the wherewithal to maintain the hospitals. But, said Mrs Stranger, give freely as the great public of Melbourne might, hospital administration was necessarily harassed from day to day through having no fixed income to meet commitments. Visitors from New Zealand, and notably frohi Otago, had explained to Melbourne hospital authorities the obvious advantages of New Zealand’s hospital taxation system, but it had not yet been adopted in the Victorian metropolis.

So urgent was the need for voluntary assistance of the Melbourne hospitals, added Mrs Stranger, that appeals were conducted monthly. It might be a jam, an egg, or a towel day, but it was held every month and the gifts went to the hospital to supply needs which the Government grant did not cover under the heading of maintenance. And then, of course, there was the great annual Hospital Day when the appeal was for money alone and when £30,000 or so might be subscribed by an open-hearted public, but it was none too much when shared among the many hospitals in Melbourne.

Concluding the interview- Mrs Stranger eulogised New Zealand’s hospitals in their entirety and expressed the wish that our system of framing estimates and levying taxation to meet them would be adopted in the “Island Continent.”