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I've got a lot of time for Simeon Brown - he's a very good politician, but I reckon he might want to take the advice of Chris Hipkins - a man who was also once the Health Minister - and just tone down the fighting talk.

Because accusing the striking senior doctors of the worst kind of politics is not going to help anyone. The only thing that is going to help right now is money - and he is simply going to have to pony up the cash and pay those doctors a lot more.

Look, I know, there will not be a lot of public sympathy for doctors who are on that kind of money - whether it's $350,000 like Simeon claims or only $250,000 like the doctors claim - it doesn't matter whether we think they're paid not enough or too much
 
What matters is what the rest of the world pays, because that’s who we are competing against for senior doctors. 
 
NSW, I've been told, is the part of Australia that pays senior doctors the least, and their starting pay is more than what our senior doctors get on the highest level here. And they, by the way, just had a three-day strike themselves.

We already have such a shortage of senior doctors in this country that in Taupo Hospital not even a third of the positions are filled. I don't know how they're running that place.

So while I appreciate that Simeon Brown is a very good politician and could well end up wining the PR battle against the doctors - ultimately, it's not the voters he has to convince, it's the doctors. 

And there, money talks.

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