If Maori are to be treated properly, they should be allowed a healthy dose of racial discrimination

If Maori are to be treated properly, they should be allowed a healthy dose of racial discrimination

When Alf is poorly and needs medical treatment, he goes for it.

He does not inquire about the ethnicity of the medics who will treat him. He has been treated by doctors, dentists, physiotherapists and so on of all persuasions.

Accordingly he considers it neither here nor there that no statistics are being kept to tell us how the country’s medical work force stacks up on an ethnicity measure.

In a country that professes to be intolerant of racial discrimination, this is well and good.

Except that…

Well, except that the country’s indigenous people (which means their boat got here ahead of anybody else’s boat), regard themselves as special.

They have had their special status blessed by the United Nations.

And now they are hellbent on turning it into special treatment, which includes an element of racial discrimination against non-Maori.

They regard this as positive discrimination, of course.

One of the consequences is their demand for Maori to be treated by Maori medics, something that would land a non-Maori in big shit with the Race Relations Commissioner and God know who else should they ask to be treated by a non-Maori medic.

And so according to Radio NZ –

A governance group has been formed to consider a report calling for a boost in the number of Maori health workers.

Health Workforce New Zealand last year released Thriving as Maori in 2030, which found there were not enough Maori health workforce workers and that numbers would need to triple by 2030 to manage the ageing and growing population.

Ruth Anderson, acting director of Health Workforce New Zealand, said it had formed an internal governance group with representatives from across the Ministry of Health to consider the report’s recommendations.

Health Minister Tony Ryall last month invited the Nurses Organisation, which represents more than 3000 Maori health workers, to have a say in initial discussions.

Kerri Nuku is the Nurses Organisation kaiwhakahaere – which is a special and much more cumbersome way of saying “manager”. She popped up to say there are no data on the current Maori health workforce, which made it difficult to plan for the future.

As Alf said earlier, this is as it should be in a country that does not discriminate.

Sadly, the urge to be special translates into an urge to be discriminatory.

You can betcha it won’t be long before the ethnic breakdown is provided.

Maori then can do the planning they can’t do now, which is plan for an increasing amount of health resources to be earmarked for special purposes. Theirs.