MICHAEL BASSETT: WISH-LISTS AND REALITY

Every day our mainstream media carry claims for extra government money for a variety of causes. The journalists reporting them show little interest in analysing the worthiness of the demands. Many are distressingly self-serving such as calls for higher wages, more holidays, or expensive personal health care. None is ever accompanied by any explanation as to where the government is to find the extra funds. No Kiwi journalist invites the latest supplicants to explain whether they want higher taxes, or whether some specific current beneficiary of state assistance should be stripped of resources so that the money can be re-allocated to the new claimant. Journalists and supplicants alike treat government funds as a bottomless pit, as though there is always money available for any cause, with the inference readers are meant to draw that it is only meanness or deliberate blindness on the part of ministers that prevents their demands being met.

This last week after salaried medical specialists announced they intended striking on 1 May for a 12% increase in pay and other benefits I had hopes that sanity might emerge. Health Minister Simeon Brown appeared on TV One reminding the public that hospital specialists who intend putting lives at risk by striking were already being rather well remunerated. Salaries of well over $300,000 are common, as are generous holidays and sabbatical leave. The public is entitled to such information. But nowhere in the print media did I see mention of the minister’s message. None of the Herald’s weak journalists tried their hands at analysis of the doctors’ case. TV One itself carried a response questioning the minister’s figures, and repeating the doctors’ war cry that pay across the ditch in Australia was higher, and that “undervalued” doctors might well emigrate.

The trouble with this kind of argument is that many other professions can make the same claim. Australia’s economy is considerably stronger than New Zealand’s because John Key in 2010 as well as subsequent leaders failed to adopt the advice handed to them by an expert panel about what needed to be done to close the gap. The prospect that one professional group might succeed in unilaterally redressing the balance between Australia and New Zealand is frankly preposterous.

If, as doctors say, there is a serious doctor vacancy rate in our hospitals, then the government needs to consider other measures than pay levels to fill the gaps. There is no shortage of students wanting to go to medical schools. Medicine is a much sought-after career, with rather arbitrary limits on training numbers from a well-qualified pool of applicants. If there was to be an option for an additional intake of students who were prepared to sign a ten-year bond to work in New Zealand after graduation, either in public hospitals or in rural areas, the allocation would be rapidly filled. It’s a supply and demand question, and the government holds the whip hand.

However, there remains the widespread underlying problem of large and unrealistic public expectations of what the state can provide in the absence of any willingness to take steps necessary to close the economic gap with Australia. This will continue to be used by well-placed professions wanting to turn their scarcity to personal advantage. Better education in schools and universities about how governments fund services, and tougher scrutiny by journalists about seemingly excessive claims by interest groups would be a useful interim measure. A willingness by ministers to get tough with pressure groups would also bring more balance to the public’s understanding of the seemingly endless claims that are in play. Bottom line, the issue is probably whether New Zealanders are prepared to face up to the reforms necessary to lift our economic performance to that of Australia.

A country that tolerates huge numbers of children born into welfare, so many young skipping school, and declining achievement standards amongst those who do attend, can scarcely expect first world standards of health, or any other kind of care. Get real is the message.

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