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ACT leader and Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour says a university medical programme that targets Māori and Pacific students is built on “racial discrimination”, and a new review hasn’t proven otherwise.
But the University of Auckland is backing the programme, which it says plays a “vital role in closing the gaps” and building up the Māori and Pacific doctor workforce.
ACT has been staunchly opposed to the Māori and Pacific Admissions Scheme (MAPAS) at the Auckland and Otago universities, which the universities say is intended to grow diversity of health professionals by removing some of the barriers to study.
The review of MAPAS was part of the National-ACT coalition agreement and the Ministry of Health has now completed the review, but it is yet to be released publicly.
The universities also have a regional rural admission scheme that selects students based on their rural primary and secondary school attendance.
Seymour told Midday Report he has no issue with that element.
“I oppose racial discrimination. I don’t oppose living in the country. I don’t oppose, for example, trying to train rural GPs. I don’t oppose bonding people to work in the countryside where it’s hard to get people… those are separate issues.”
Seymour says the MAPAS review is being held by Associate Health Minister Matt Doocey, who will release it “in good time”.
In the meantime he has had a briefing on it and says it “appears it does not do what I sincerely hoped it would do”.
Professor Warwick Bagg, dean of the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, is calling on the review to be released urgently “so the public can judge its findings for themselves”.
“All medical students, regardless of admission pathway, must meet the same academic, clinical and professional standards before they graduate,” Professor Bagg said.
“Every student selected to study medicine at the University of Auckland has earned their place and is expected to demonstrate the competence, professionalism, and commitment required of a future doctor.”
But Seymour doesn’t believe the review has done what it set out to do.
He says it was intended to demonstrate “what is a clear case of racial discrimination” has a purpose and effect that is consistent with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
New Zealand is a signatory to that convention, and if it is “to be violated then it should only be for specific, effective and temporary purposes to overcome inequalities of the past”, he said.
In the case of this review Seymour doesn’t believe universities or government departments “have been able to provide that justification”.
Seymour says the onus on the report writers has been “misunderstood”.
“They seem to believe that the onus is on anybody who opposes racial discrimination to justify stopping it.
“I take the opposite view that anyone who believes people should be discriminated against based on their race has to justify why that’s necessary, and that is certainly the position taken in the international convention that New Zealand’s been a signatory to for some decades,” he told Midday Report.
Seymour hasn’t seen the full review, but in the briefing he has had, he says it appears “the review’s authors were under the misapprehension that their job was simply to show that some good might be done by this discrimination - not that it’s consistent with New Zealand’s international obligations”.
“Frankly, what any right-thinking person should believe that we don’t do racism, and if we do, there’d better be a bloody good reason for it, and it should be a temporary measure for a specific purpose.”
He says the review says the programme should continue, but Seymour says that conclusion is based on the wrong assumptions.
“I don’t like hearing from constituents and members of the public saying that myself or my child missed out on entry to medical school, even though they had much higher grades than people who did get in on the grounds of race. That is absolutely abominable.”
If the report had concluded the discrimination was justified as a “temporary and effective measure” Seymour said he would be happy to see the programme continue.
“The report does not do that. It leaves us in a no man’s land where the report writers seem to think that you can casually justify racism and it should just continue. Well, I don’t accept that. The people that I talk to, people who miss out on going to medical school based on their race, they don’t accept that, so that leaves us campaigning to end it.”
‘Long way to go’
Speaking to RNZ’s Checkpoint on Friday afternoon, Bagg said he had not seen the final version of the report, but had seen a near-final draft, which he said backed keeping the scheme.
“From what we’ve seen of the draft report, the scheme is achieving what it was set out to do, and so very much we would be delighted to see the final report and have it released.”
He said there was a “long way to go” to get both “demographic equity” as well as equitable health outcomes.
“We have seen a steady increase in the number of Māori and Pacific doctors over time. But for Māori, they are still only just over 5 percent of doctors, for Pacific, around 3 percent.”
He said it was taking time to improve university entrance rates and success for Māori and Pacific people in the field, but “we are making steady progress every year”.
The still-low percentage of doctors of Māori and Pacific heritage was partly down to a growing number of overseas-born doctors, he said.
“I’m not problematising that because I’m one of them. But the pool of doctors is getting bigger every year, so our job of growing the Māori and Pacific doctors is also challenging, because the denominator is bigger.”
Bagg said it was “absolutely not the case” that doctors enrolled via the scheme were inferior to others.
“Every student has to pass exactly the same assessments. Patient safety is our utmost goal, and delivering safe and equitable health care remains paramount for us. All of our students need to meet those goals in order to go into a health workforce.”
He said there was no truth to claims others would miss out because of a quota, because there was no quota. The target was for 40 percent of the intake to be Māori and Pasifika, because that matched the demographics of the youth population in the North Island - and they were not even meeting that target at present.
“The fundamental issue is that we are limited by the government, the number of students we can take each year, because of the cost of medical training.”
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