John McLean: Infectious Medical Council Maori Madness

A chance insight into the Ministry of Health’s collective mind

Talking to embedded individuals can provide intriguing insights into elite sentiments on controversial matters.

I recently chewed the fat with one of our neighbors, an English-born doctor idling at the Ministry of Health. When I asked him what the general mood is at that Ministry, his face clouded with anger. He explained that Ministry staff are all furious and terribly distracted over the Minister of Health, baby faced assassin Simeon Brown, firing the chair and deputy-chair of the Medical Council.

Already vaguely familiar with the kerfuffle, I politely pointed out to said neighbor that Dr Rachelle Love (chair) and Simon Watt (deputy-chair) had not been fired and that their terms on the Council had simply expired, with Brown merely deciding not to re-appoint them for further terms. But the good doctor – not to be told otherwise – lectured me, in no uncertain terms, that Brown was duty bound to reappoint the Love Watt duo because…the Medical Council itself had decided that the Love Watts should remain on the Medical Council. Recognising that I was wasting my time talking to his haughty hand, I left it at that.

The legal position couldn’t be clearer. Under the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003, the Minister of Health appoints all members of the Medical Council, who remain Medical Councillors until their terms expire. Clear as a bell.

Normal people in the real world understand and accept that, if they are on fixed term tenures, they may well not be reappointed. But the New Zealand public service in general, and the Medical Council in particular, is not a real world composed of normal people. And neither is Radio New Zealand, who’s coverage of the expiry of Love’s & Watt’s terms was headed with this nonsense:

Note, if you will, all the telltale signs of RNZ’s political bias against the current government. The passive voice (“Concerns raised”). The use of “replacement” to falsely insinuate that Minister Brown has actively removed Love and Watt.

So, who exactly is the concerned citizen? It’s a woman by the name of Sarah Dalton, “executive director” of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS), the communist trade union for New Zealand’s senior “health professionals”. According to Dalton:

[Brown’s non-reappointment of Love & Watt] “sets a dangerous precedent in political interference with a regulatory body”

“cultural competence was about making sure medical practitioners were aware of what their own assumptions and prejudices may be, and to ensure that they understood the context of their patients’ lives”

“The minister could benefit from education on these matters”

It’s abundantly clear, therefore, that Dalton has drunk deep from the neo-Marxist Woke Well, to the point of drowning in it. So, apart from wallowing in her white privilege, what are Dalton’s credentials to lecture Simeon Brown on what doctors need, and how Simeon should do his job? Answer – precisely none.

Dalton has no medical credentials whatsoever. She has an arts degree in English literature and history, together with a teaching diploma. More particularly, Dalton is a dyed-in-her-wool trade unionist. Before joining the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (where she’s been for over 11 years), Dalton was seven years at the neo-Marxist anti-education Post Primary Teachers’ Association. According to her Linkedin, Dalton is About “Equity, diversity, sustainability” and “Working towards restorative paradigms”.

Dalton is therefore, transparently, an ideologically-driven zealot who hasn’t a clue how democracy and the rule of law ought to work. For Dalton to accuse Simeon Brown of political bias is the very height of hypocrisy, a reality that’d of course be completely lost on Demented DEI Dalton.

The Woke extremism that probably tipped Brown into not re-appointing Love & Watt was the Medical Council’s promulgation, earlier this year, of proposed new statements for the medical profession on cultural competence, cultural safety and hauora Māori (a mythical “holistic” Māori philosophy of health). The draft statements created a furor, so extreme was the Māori-focused apartheid that they contained. The Medical Council has now buried the draft statements, and I’ve been unable to find a copy. But the statements must have been outlandish, given the Council’s current, operative Statement on Cultural Safety (2019) is itself woefully Woke whacky:

Click to view

“Cultural safety requires doctors to reflect on how their own views and biases

Evidence shows that a competence-based approach alone will not deliver improvements in health equity

In Aotearoa/New Zealand, cultural safety is of particular importance in the attainment of equitable health outcomes for Māori

Challenge the cultural bias of individual colleagues or systemic bias within health care services

Understanding how our colonial history, systemic bias and inequities have impacted Māori and Māori health outcomes

Council acknowledges the Indigenous rights of Māori within New Zealand and supports the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”

Departed Medical Council chair, Dr (Strange) Love, is manifestly an extreme Critical Race Theorist, with a penchant for attention-seeking spectacles.

Departed deputy chair Simon Watt is slippery fish. I used to work with him at the Bell Gully law firm. While a partner at Bell Gully, Watt negotiated the New Zealand’s contact with pharmaceutical conglomerate Pfizer for supply of COVID vaccines. That’s the secretive contract, complete with water-tight confidentiality obligations, under which the New Zealand Government bound itself to keep the contract well away from the prying eyes of the New Zealand public. It’s the contract that – with the endorsement of the Government Ombudsman – our Ministries of Business Innovation and Employment, and of Foreign Affairs, together with Pharmac, have refused to publish.

What general themes can we draw from all this?

First, New Zealand’s senior public “service” is replete with Woke ideological extremists who consider they have divine rights to:

• complete shelter from any political scrutiny and accountability

• perpetually re-appoint themselves, outside of all applicable statutory processes. Inhabitants of “industry bodies” such as the Medical Council are characterized by a gross, antidemocratic sense of self-importance and entitlement to be free from democratic political accountability, to be at lawless liberty to eternally pursue their own crazed ideological agendas.

Secondly, criticism of Parliamentary laws and legislative initiatives has moved from critique to insinuations of illegitimacy i.e., that the relevant impugned law is not simply faulty or without merit but is somehow irregular or invalid.

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown repeatedly falls into this mental trap, with his constant refrains that “Wellington” (Parliament) should leave his fiefdom of Tāmaki Makaurau alone, including not question the racist statutory Māori representation on key Auckland Council committees.

Thirdly, this Māori race preferencing and differentiation is all, at core, racist stereotyping. Deep down, the Pakeha Daltons of Woketearoa think the noble, dimwitted natives are desperately in need of their sickening succor.

Last, what do these multitudes of mandarins actually do all day? Are we really meant to believe that the 1,500 non-front line individuals who dwell in the Ministry of Health are all diligently writing useful policy papers, monitoring legislation and health sector performance and generally working to improve the health of everyday New Zealanders? Of course they’re not. They’re all mostly just bitching, around their coffee machines and water filters and in the Molesworth Street cafes, about Simeon Brown not appointing their fellow travellers. This crap must end.

John McLean is a citizen typist and enthusiastic amateur who blogs at John's Substack where this article was sourced