The proposal for the University of Waikato to host the country’s third medical school appears to go against all common sense and jar with the government’s mantra to keep on cutting as a way of improving the economy.
Chop, chop, chop away — oh, until we find a daft-enough idea to back to the hilt, regardless of combined logic and wisdom which says we shouldn’t be doing so.
Meanwhile, the Waikato medical school snowball seems to be inexorably gathering momentum as it rolls down the hill.
Only now we have the somewhat unlikely figure of Act New Zealand leader and deputy prime minister-in-waiting David Seymour piling up the snow ahead of it in an attempt to slow things down.
By doing so, and taking on Health Minister Dr Shane Reti directly over the proposal, Mr Seymour has shown there are cracks in the coalition facade.
Mr Seymour and Act were less than convinced a third medical school was needed and, during the coalition formation talks a year ago, made it clear to incoming Prime Minister Christopher Luxon that a full cost-benefit analysis had to be carried out before any decision was made on the new school.
Ahead of the election, National had campaigned on the $380 million Waikato proposal, to focus on training rural GPs.
The university’s vice-chancellor, Prof Neil Quigley, rather excitedly, and a touch ill-advisedly, emailed Dr Reti last year to say "the first student intake would be 2027 — a present to you to start your second term in government".
Transtasman research company Sapere, one of the government’s preferred tenderers, undertook an initial cost-benefit analysis of the plan, which Dr Reti said two months ago provided "confidence for the project to progress to the next stage".
What we now know, with the public release of a letter this week from Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand, is that Mr Seymour took issue with Dr Reti and with the findings of Sapere, whose analysis concluded that the Waikato option had the highest benefit-cost ratio out of all options, which included expanding training at the Otago and Auckland medical schools.
Mr Seymour said he had no confidence in Sapere’s finding, in which it had accounted for the costs and benefits of providing GPs, but did not add in the value likely to be provided by about 1300 extra specialist doctors expected to be working by 2042.
The research group’s "omission" materially changed their analysis and fell short of the coalition agreement’s commitment to a full cost-benefit analysis, Mr Seymour said.
Most interestingly, Mr Seymour said his staff had taken another look at Sapere’s results "in a relatively basic way" and included the value of those new specialist doctors. The conclusion from that re-analysis erased or reversed the proposed advantage of the third medical school. On that basis, he did not support the proposal being advanced to a detailed business case.
It certainly beggars belief that the consultants would choose to leave out such an important parameter in their analysis to come to the conclusions they did. Sapere has already been in the media recently over its engagement by MBIE to carry out the initial, failed, Wellington "science city" proposal and also the review of New Zealand’s public weather forecasting sector.
Politics is a funny old business. Who would have thought, just a few days ago when more than 40,000 people arrived in Wellington protesting about Mr Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, that they might now agree with him on something totally different?
His calling out of Dr Reti, National and Sapere for what he sees as a selective analysis of the medical school issue is to be commended. We have a perfectly good medical school in Dunedin, which would welcome more funding. There is no need to put new money into a Waikato venture.
This isn’t the first time this government has been rebuked for appearing not to take notice of proper, rigorous scientific evidence.
