Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 38, Number 13. 12th June 1975

[Introduction]

One of the Labour Party's most effective advertisements of the 1972 Election Campaign was on the Health Service, showing a young family with a sick child trying to contact a doctor. The caption underneath was the answerphone's reply: 'The doctor is unavailable ...' Recent ads. showing the genial face of Tom McGuigan have asked: 'How long have you had to wait for a doctor?' Bob Tizard's Budget this year (p22) stated: 'When the Government took office in 1972, it inherited health services which had been allowed to run down in earlier years... the whole structure of health care was in need of an overhaul'.

These ideas are pushed hard in the Government's recent White Paper entitled. 'A Health Service for New Zealand', which Bob Tizard has described as 'a comprehensive review of all aspects of health care', while various other people (eg. the National Party and various doctors) have attacked the plan on grounds ranging from 'creeping socialism' to 'interfering with the relationship between the patient and the doctor'.

As far as most of the public is concerned, however, the White Paper is a bit of a non-starter. Despite various plans for feedback, there has not been much discussion or comment, possibly because most people (quite sensibly) don't feel like wading through 180 pages of turgid prose and another 110 of statistics and tables (including a 35 page comparison of the Hospital Acts of 1885, 1909, 1926 and 1957). And that's one of the bad things about this White Paper — its very difficult to read. 620 paragraphs wind their way backwards and forwards, often recovering ground (see later on private health proposals), nearly always in an uninteresting style.