Mike's Minute: Health is adjusting back to being fair

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

We end the week with a bit of good health news.

We have been weighed down this week with the scrap over 14 layers of management, no doctors in Dargaville at certain times of the day, four new CEOs in four regional operations that will allegedly sort the mess out, former board members snapping back at criticism from the Prime Minister, and a myopic media trying their best to out Shane Reti on what may or may not be some sort of semi-scandal around his interpretation of the need to sack boards.

But there is good news. It's the removal, or the cancellation, of the ethnic diversity equity adjustor.

You'll remember it. It was a massive scrap under the last Government, who tried desperately to explain that using race was a good way to work out who to put at the front of the non-urgent surgery line.

Five indicators were used, things like age and location. But race was the one that got most of us upset, given we thought we lived in a fair and open country where race was not an issue when it comes to publicly funded services.

It was predicated on the idea that Māori are not well served by health, and in some respects that is true. But poor, old Chris Hipkins got himself woefully tied up in knots over an example of a person who lived rurally, many of them Māori, and how because you were rural you didn’t have the same access to doctors as you would in a city, which is true.

But then neither do you if you live rurally but aren't Māori. That particular piece of logic seemed to elude him.

When faced with the example of the two people with the same conditions and the same need fronting, except one was Māori and one wasn’t, why was it fair that race then made the difference? They couldn’t quite offer an explanation that made sense.

Ironically, some in the health service who reviewed it defended it. But people also seem to be able to defend Māori seats, Māori wards, Māori funding and services and entitlements that are purely race-based.

No wonder they are so angsty about David Seymour's Treaty bill. When the scales are tipped that far your way an injection of balance and fairness and open democracy must be a bit worrying.

So in health the race equity adjustor is going. A reason, if not to celebrate, at least to be relieved about.

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