Thank goodness Simeon is Health Minister

The Post reports:

Health Minister Simeon Brown has removed the leadership of New Zealand’s medical regulator, accusing the Medical Council of pursuing an “ideological agenda” and becoming distracted from its core responsibilities.

Brown has declined to reappoint chairperson Dr Rachelle Love and deputy chairperson Simon Watt, despite both remaining eligible for reappointment under the statutory nine-year term limit.

The decision appears to be unprecedented.

Unprecedented and absolutely necessary. The Medical Council had decided that their job was no longer simply to make sure doctors were competent, but to impose a political and ideological requirement on every doctor in NZ where they would have to agree with a left wing view of the world or face deregistration.

Of course the Minister would take action.

Brown said the regulator was straying into ideological territory, pointing to its recent consultation on two draft statements setting out updated expectations for doctors on cultural competence and safety and Māori health and wellbeing.

These required clinicians to understand how culture affects health outcomes and how bias and systemic factors can contribute to inequities.

“You only need to look at the council’s recent consultation documents, which ask doctors to examine their own ‘privilege’, to challenge the ‘dominant culture’ of the health system, to study the difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation, and to help ‘dismantle’ systems,“ Brown said.

“Kiwis expect the Medical Council to be focused on strengthening the medical workforce, not on an ideological agenda.”

They were seeking to impose a political and ideological view of New Zealand on every doctor in NZ. That is not their job, so they got the boot. Great.

The problem is almost every regulator – from real estate to law has caught the woke virus. The only long-term way to stop them is a law change saying regulators can only impose requirements around competence – not around ideology.

An alternative approach would be to allow competing regulators for an industry. I suspect the vast majority of a profession would move to the regulator that simply imposes competence requirements rather than political and ideological requirements.