Barry Brill: Does healthcare treat people or races?

The new Community Pharmacy Minor Ailments Service will be provided free by local pharmacies to treat minor ailments and ease the pressure on GPs.

This makes a lot of sense in our country’s current self-induced health crisis. In fact, it might well be the most sensible decision yet taken by Ayesha Verrall, since she took over the poisoned chalice of Minister of Health.

But wait…. there’s a problem.… a really, really, major problem. Not a single adult New Zealander without a Community Service Card can actually use this funded service unless they can show that they have at least one ancestor who was a Polynesian – either Pasifica or Maori.

The Government’s Te Whatu Ora has also introduced an “Equity Adjustor Score” which uses an algorithm to prioritise patients according to clinical priority, time spent on the waitlist, geographic location (isolated areas), deprivation level and ethnicity. A soupçon of Polynesian blood again ranks you higher than any of your fellow New Zealanders

Why?

• It is NOT because Maori live in rural areas – that has already earned points.

• It is NOT because Pasifica people are economically deprived – already scored.

• It is NOT because of greater clinical need – also separately scored

• It is NOT because they wait longer than others – waiting times are factored in

• It is NOT related to The Treaty, because it is for the descendants of ordinary Polynesians, not Iwi chieftains

Professor Peter Davis has exploded the pathetic claim that this new racial discrimination will somehow offset perceived past inequalities in Polynesian access to healthcare. If that was ever true of earlier generations it is not true now, as Davis’s data shows

So, what is left? Our Government hasn’t explained and our media hasn’t asked.

Tragically, all that’s left is an incoherent but visceral bias against ‘white privilege’, colonialism and the impact of Western Civilisation. Bigotry against those of European descent. A sense of unavenged wrongs to earlier generations, so that the “sins of the fathers” cry out for utu.

The worst of it is that most of the people who carry all this prejudice have no Polynesian antecedents themselves. White social justice warriors, they seem suffused by guilt. Or maybe they are just frantic virtue-signallers within a hard left elite whose distorted values are dominated by attitudes to race, gender and climate change.

As MP Brooke van Velden points out, this is “a deeply regressive policy, a far cry from modern sensibilities that tell us things like ethnicity, gender and sexuality shouldn’t’ have any bearing on how you are treated”.

New Zealand’s new policies coincide with a resounding condemnation of “reverse racism” by the US Supreme Court in the seminal case of Students for Fair Admission v Harvard.

In 237 pages, the Court’s central finding was: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it”. This aligns with an earlier much-quoted aphorism by Chief Justice Roberts: “the best way to get rid of discrimination on the basis of race is to get rid of discrimination on the basis of race”.

Justice Clarence Thomas denounced racial stereotyping, calling for individuals to be treated in accord with their individual characteristics and needs:

“A myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.”

Our healthcare segregation policies are the stuff of ideological racial discrimination, pure and simple! They conjure mental images of the ‘separate but equal’ policies of the segregated American South; the apartheid policies of South Africa; the disgusting eugenics of the Nazi Party; the terrible Rwanda genocide. Why is that sort of filth coming to our colour-blind country? How can it possibly be justified?

To the dismay of many, our established media have framed the question in the opposite way. Why not have racial segregation? What’s wrong with it?

Claire Trevett is one of our most senior and widely-respected political commentators. A deputy-editor of the NZ Herald, she was chairman of the Parliamentary Press Gallery almost a decade ago. In a Beehive Diaries report, Claire says:

“Luxon got himself back into .. another mixed message. The latter was over whether National would scrap all of the factors used in a Te Whatu Ora equity calculator … and it still remains unclear why the ethnicity factor is so problematic for them but the priority for rural and low-income people is not.”

Clearly, the NZ Herald cannot fathom how Chris Luxon could possibly baulk at a health system triaged by ethnicity. They can see no moral difference between helping the needy and racial prejudice.

The same newspaper unhesitatingly accepted multi-million-dollar Labour Government subsidies and promised to: “Actively promote the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner”.

The unavoidable conclusion is that the NZ Herald has volunteered as a foot soldier in “the culture wars”. It is a participant, rather than a reporter of news, and is wholly blinded by its conflicts of interest.

Barry Brill OBE JP LL.M(Hons) M.ComLaw is a former MP and Minister of Energy, Petrocorp director, and chair of the Gas Council, Power NZ, ESANZ, and EMCO. He is presently the Chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.