A challenging, clarifying, provocative style*

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