New Zealand is a nation suffering from "boiled frog syndrome" as it watches its health services crumble and its economy become a "basket case", says a Sydney Morning Herald columnist.
In a prominently featured opinion piece, Miranda Devine said New Zealand's complacency about its fate carried lessons for Australia.
"Four days in
New Zealand is long enough to learn you never want to be at the mercy of its hospital system," she said.
Devine has just returned from the funeral of a New Zealand relative, whose premature death from cancer, she said, was due partly to misdiagnosis.
While there, she had to take a 2-year-old suffering from asthma to Dunedin Hospital, where she was told that the child was fine.
The next day, a doctor prescribed steroids and antibiotics.
Another relative, a teenager, had suffered acute abdominal pain and other ailments for three weeks but was sent away with Panadol and inconclusive blood tests each time he went to the hospital.
His problem was finally diagnosed by his GP.
"Among locals, tales of woe from accident and emergency departments are common," Devine said.
"But, in the face of a crumbling hospital system in a town which once boasted it had the best medical school in the Southern Hemisphere, New Zealanders remain stoic and uncomplaining."
She said there were bright spots in the economy, such as the growing commodity that education had become in terms of fee-paying overseas students and the booming rural sector.
"But the bright spots can't save New Zealand," she said.
The cases of 20-year-old paranoid schizophrenic Mark Burton, who stabbed his mother to death in Queenstown in March, and Northland GP Graham Parry, struck off the medical register for mistakes in diagnosing a cervical cancer patient, illustrated the effects of the "crumbling infrastructure in health services alone".
Devine said that, in Dr Parry, who had been under an enormous workload, Northland had lost a dedicated doctor, with no one to take his place.
She said New Zealanders seemed content for now and looked like re-electing Prime Minister Helen Clark.
"Perhaps they suffer from boiled frog syndrome - too long in a slowly heating pot to realise something is wrong.
"It's a tragedy for a country so physically beautiful, which last decade was being hailed as an economic success story."
- NZPA
