Agreement?

Who Should Pay For

Flu Hospital Service?

And How Sacred is an Agreement?

Osuva, May 12.

NE section of the very con troversial report of the Fiji Fiscal Review Committee, with its numerous recommendations, has revived the vexed question of whether hospital service should be paid for, and by whom.

Incidentally, it is difficult to find anybody outside some commercial groups who has a good word to say for the main points of the report, which include proposals for in creased indirect taxation by im port and export duties: a land tax for all owners, including the Fijian owners of communal land: some changes in direct taxation on com mercial interests of various kinds; but little relief, if any, for in dividuals in the way of income tax adjustments: and other proposals which appear to promise an acceleration of the inflationary spiral.

The report admits that increased indirect taxation would raise the cost of living, necessitating in creased wages.

Any idea of any kind of an elementary Welfare State in Fiji is firmly knocked on the head. Every body, the report suggests, should pay for what they receive in social services, including education and medical services.

THIS brings up the cause of a major uproar in the Legislative Council in 1952. It was then proposed that hospital and medical charges should be extended to everybody who could afford to pay fees on a reasonable scale.

The Fijian members, with some of the European members, rose in wrath to point out that when, many years ago, the Fijian-built provincial hospitals on Fijian land were taken over by the Government, it was agreed that the Fijians would get free treatment in Government in stitutions. The Europeans demanded free treatment for the Fijians—and let all others who had the means pay for their own treatment.

With disregard of history, the Indian ranks immediately raised the cry of “discrimination.” Either the Fijians must pay up, they declared, or everybody must get a free ride —even the Europeans. Non-Indians pointed out that Indian hospital patients and outpatients comprise an enormous majority of the total, but this did nothing to break the deadlock, and the question went to a committee.

The committee’s majority report (there were sundry minority re

ports) said that the Fijians, in the light of the agreement, were en titled to free treatment.

But the Fiscal Review Committee disagrees, and propos3s, in effect, that the Government should go into a huddle with the Fijian leaders with the objective of getting round, over or under the agreement. That, at least, appear to be the meaning of Paragraph 62 of the Fiscal Re view Committee’s report.

BUT the committee went further.

Paragraph 62 contains a sent ence which has provoked some strong criticism. The sentence ex pressed the view that whatever the form of the original agreement or undertaking, "it does not neces sarily follow that it should continue

forever in spite of social or economic changes. .

The Fiji Times commented: "To talk about changed conditions, for which in many ways the Fijians are not responsible, is mere bolstering of expediency. On these lines, and m view of the suggestion that the Government should ‘consult’ (a lovely word in this connection) with the Fijian leaders in an effort to secure the dishing of the agreement, no pledge or agreement is safe.”

The reasons given by the New South Wales Government in 1930, when making a proposal to re pudiate national debt repayments to London, because of the economic slump, were cited as a parallel.

It looks like another of Fiji’s inter-racial deadlocks.