NZDSOS Calls for Medical Council of New Zealand to be Replaced
The Medical Council of New Zealand has issued a draft Statement on Hauora Māori (Māori health and wellbeing) which imposes new expectations for doctors to actively advance Māori health equity and address what the document describes as unfair systems and power imbalances within the health sector. The proposal suggests practitioners should undertake critical self-reflection to identify bias, support Māori leadership in the workforce, and work toward achieving better health outcomes for Māori. If adopted, the statement could embed these race-linked equity focused expectations into national professional standards for doctors.
NZDSOS has issued an open letter to the Prime Minister and relevant Ministers advising that, for pushing non-equitable critical race theory onto doctors, as well as its many covid era failures, the Medical Council should be placed under administration.
March 9, 2026
Rt Hon Christopher Luxon
Prime Minister of New Zealand
cc:
Hon Simeon Brown, Minister of Health
Hon Casey Costello, Associate Minister of Health
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Minister of Foreign Affairs
Hon David Seymour, Deputy Prime Minister / Minister for Regulation
Hon Paul Goldsmith, Minister of Justice
Hon Judith Collins, Attorney-General
Dear Prime Minister and relevant Ministers,
RE: Formal Complaint Regarding Medical Council of New Zealand Draft Statement on Hauora Māori
We are writing to you formally as concerned doctors at NZDSOS to object to the Medical Council of New Zealand’s current consultation on its draft Statement on Hauora Māori, which is open for feedback until 24 March 2026.
We do so in the context of your Government’s clear electoral commitment (and mandate) to ensuring that healthcare in New Zealand is prioritised according to clinical need, not ethnicity. It is deeply concerning, therefore, to see a statutory body under your portfolio actively advancing a framework that directly contradicts this principle.
Ideological Overreach, Not Clinical Care
The draft statement is not a document about clinical competence. It is a political manifesto dressed in medical language, and with it the MCNZ seems to rejoin the Long March it began with the previous government – if indeed it ever stopped. It requires doctors to take “meaningful action to advance health equity for Māori” by “dismantling unfair systems” and engaging in “critical self-reflection” to identify personal bias.
This is not medicine as MCNZ should be overseeing, but rather the language of Critical Race Theory and what can only be described as medical Marxism. It presumes that all health outcomes are a function of power imbalances and collective guilt, and it demands that doctors adopt a specific ideological worldview as a condition of registration. A doctor who provides excellent clinical care but questions this framing will, under this proposal, be deemed professionally deficient.
That seems less of a standard and more a loyalty test. Doctors are asked to perform public contrition for unprovable ‘biases,’ knowing that no amount of compliance guarantees safety from future sanction. We have seen this play out already: colleagues who raised covid concerns in good faith remain ‘in process’ with the Medical Council five years later. This is not right-touch regulation but ritualised obedience training. Medicine is in crisis already; this further top-down imposition will be a final straw for many doctors. If the goal is to backstop the profession with overseas doctors, we wonder how quickly they will assimilate the Treaty awareness that good doctors have woven into their practice already.
Contradiction with Government Policy
Your Government has been explicit: access to healthcare should be based on need, not race. Yet the Medical Council is moving in the opposite direction, embedding ethnicity as the primary lens through which all medical interactions must be viewed. There are strong signals from within some District Health Boards that Māori are given waiting list priority, and this de facto reverse discrimination undermines the coalition’s electoral promises.
If the Government is serious about race-neutral, need-based healthcare, it cannot allow its own Regulatory Authority to entrench the very race-based thinking you were elected to move beyond. The Council’s self-stated role is to protect the public but surely this must be through safe clinical practice, not to compel doctors to endorse contested sociological theories.
The Question of Credibility
We must also note that this proposal comes from a Council whose judgment on recent public health guidance has been severely questioned. Its Guidance Statement on the COVID-19 vaccine – which remains glaring out from its website, for “historical reasons” – caused profound moral injury to doctors who were prevented from raising legitimate concerns. The fact that the High Court found the Guidance lawful does not mean it was ethical, nor does it undo the damage done to professional trust and open discourse within the medical community. The MCNZ has one overarching statutory obligation under the Act that created it, and that is to defend medical ethics. In this clearly it has failed, since 2021.
There is hypocrisy in plain sight in the Draft Statement on Hauora Māori too. The Medical Council’s own bias and power imbalances were on full display during the vaccine mandates, when it silenced doctors and stood by while hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who asserted basic human rights in opposing mandatory vaccination were ostracised. This, despite its mantra that it exists to “protect the public’.
As you well know, we have shown that tremendous damage has been done to New Zealanders by multiple mechanisms of harm from what the prior chairman Dr Curtis Walker referred to as the ‘zero risk vaccine’. We understand that the current chair has at least expressed privately her own concerns about vaccine harms. That same body she now leads is asking doctors to trust it with a new ideological mandate. Many will not.
A Better Path
Māori health outcomes are shaped by well-understood social determinants – deprivation, housing, education, nutrition and lifestyle factors. There are numerous targeted initiatives addressing these, from Whānau Ora to specific iwi-provider contracts. Doctors already undertake cultural competence training – but we note the black hole in medical training that is clinical nutrition remains unaddressed, despite its direct relevance to the very inequalities the Council claims to care about. The answer to health disparities is not to compel shame, silence dissent, or mandate political conformity. It is to focus on the fundamentals: access, timely treatment, and the social determinants that affect all New Zealanders, regardless of ethnicity.
We urge you to direct the Medical Council to withdraw this draft statement. It exceeds its statutory mandate, it further divides rather than unites the profession, and it undermines your Government’s commitment to a healthcare system that treats New Zealanders as individuals, not as members of identity groups.
We feel the time has come to put the Medical Council under administration and appoint Commissioners to return it to its core mandate – to protect and uphold medical ethics, and return the New Zealand Bill of Rights and the principle of right-touch regulation to the fore. This latest decolonisation manoeuvre further derails the ability of doctors to act according to professional judgement and moral compass.
We would welcome the opportunity to discuss this further with you or your officials. We request that you acknowledge this letter and advise whether you will be taking any action in response to these concerns.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Yours sincerely,
Drs Matthew Shelton, Alison Goodwin and Cindy de Villiers
For and on behalf of NZDSOS Members and Supporters
Great letter but… too verbose, too accommodating by addressing all of the issues & giving them nice, correct answers.
These people are nasty and fight dirty. They are prepared to cover up the truth. Heads need to role.
Hit them where it hurts – in the power of persuading your supporters not to vote for them in the next election!
You have the power to do this.
Use it.
Bravo! Exactly on point.
This letter also echoes the relentless imposition that all Councils and Boards of the HPCA Act exert on their literally racked professions. Indeed, these administrative corporate entities require removal as the professions have lost confidence in their ability to protect the public and conduct the ethical administration their clinical jurisdictions with informed established ethics and professional fairness.
As administrators apparently acting to ‘protect the public’, in reality they noddingly not only distort and twist healthcare and medical objectives into a bizarre neo-Marxist crusade of critical race theory, but they support and collude with preposterous methods of enforcement, whether alleged ‘hate speech’ or when engaged in the dystopian and illegal ethics of mandated experimental, de novo shots. They inspire no one with their destruction of professional and social cohesion.
To deny otherwise is to suggest then that the changes to the Medical Act in early 2021 were unnecessary in order to enable the implementation of de novo experimental injections as a wide reaching public health measure. The NZ institutional derogation of the UN Siracusa Principles, and NZ BoRA was vicious, deliberate and unprincipled, and the proponents of these acts, which includes all the Councils and Boards under the HPCA Act will inevitably be held to account for their flagrantly unethical activities and the consequences arising.
Culturally ‘Safe and competent’ has the same unethical stench as medically ‘safe and effective’.
It has no place in wider New Zealand health, medical and surgical care, let alone New Zealand politics and bureaucracy.
A very pertinent letter. If Maoris require social and spiritual support for their health outcomes, why do they not seek this from their own culture as it’s not part of Western doctors’ training, whose basic standards are set by big pharma.
This definitely needs to happen. Not sure that commissioners are the way to go as they are on their own agenda go beyond their brief and create worse problems. Eg Ecan. Tauranga, Orewa.
It is interesting to note that Maori are consulted on all these issues as “experts”. Why is it that everyone else needs a PHD, or is elected? And if Maori are “experts”, what has happened to this expertise when it comes to their own health?
THE GOVT HAS IT’S BUREUACRATS RUNNING THE MEDICAL COUNCIL SO WHAT EVER HAPPENS TO MAKE DOCTORS AND NURSES ABIDE BY THIER NARRATIVE THE GOVT IS PULLING THE STRINGS.
I remember writing letters to the government in the middle of the covid mess stating that the NZ Medical Council was doing what they were told by the FSMB in Texas and should be struck off themselves — except that most of them never were doctors in the first place. Now that Gates and Fauci are telling the truth in a (hopefully unsuccessful) attempt to protect themselves from prosecution, SURELY the NZMC should be replaced at the very least. Better if they were prosecuted, but … our courts take far too long about everything already. I hope Barry Young isn’t sent to jail, thanks to Sue Grey’s defence of him, which happened two months ago. Why does the judge take so long to Make A Decision???
Our courts and our medical profession are both HOPELESS. Please let us elect NZFirst and Sue Grey’s Outdoors and Freedom Party in November and sort these people out!