Gavin Mooney entered my life in the mid
1980s when he addressed the Sydney PHA conference entitled Just Health.
What does equity mean, he asked us? Same cash-for-health for everyone? Same opportunity for access to care for everyone? Same outcome after treatment for
everyone? His challenging,
clarifying, provocative style remained during the 25 years I knew him.
Gavin’s concern was always with the ethical
quality of equity, which he came to summarise in relation to health, as equal
access to equal care for equal need.
He developed with other health economists including Culyer the concepts
of vertical equity (positive discrimination for those in unequal circumstances)
and horizontal equity (giving equal care to those in the same socioeconomic
bracket) as applied to health. He
was a strong communitarian, aligned in many respects with Amartya Sen, and a
deep critic of neoliberalism, as his last book showed. His criticism was his strongest card:
in speaking with him about his final book I asked him “What now? What can we do?” This was far from clear. But a man of
action he could be – witness his interest and work in Indigenous health and
citizen’s juries.
A Scot to the core, and from Glasgow to
boot, I was always surprised not to see him dressed more often in kilt and
sporran. His polemic and critique
were modelled on tossing the caber.
This was a symbol of the way he criticised, assembling his arguments
like a huge wooden pole, heaving the thing up on his shoulder, running and then
letting it fly until it thudded into the ground with a mighty impact.
I have a picture of Gavin in my head,
walking the Valley of the Waters in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales with
us, when our son James was two.
Gavin had him on his shoulders and James, never one then or now to miss
a moment for a politically correct and endearing statement (he is now 19), kept
saying, as was indeed true as we passed cascade after cascade, ‘Bootiful
waterfor!’ Bootiful indeed – a memory I feel fortunate to possess.
*Previously published in Croakey
