Garth George: It's not just cricketers dropping the ball

Health Minister Tony Ryall. Photo / Hawke's Bay Today

Apart from the epidemic of child abuse, too-frequent incidents of vicious cruelty to animals, family breakdowns, drunkenness, road deaths, violence and crime, there are one or two more minor matters that have lately got up my nose.

According to an old adage, a problem shared is a problem halved, so I have chosen you, dear readers, to share the burden of a few of my most recent gripes.

The first concerns the medical profession. We have read lately of the extraordinary pressure put on hospital accident and emergency departments, and also of many complaints about the exorbitant charges levied by private after-hours clinics, on weekends and public holidays.

Health Minister Tony Ryall says the Government is going to do something about it. Since the answer to the problem is so simple, it shouldn't take him too long to succeed.

There was a time when being a general practitioner was a vocation, part of which was to be available to patients 24/7, or to make sure that someone just as capable was.

Nowadays, doctoring is simply a job from which to make big dollars while taking every advantage of the perks of any other trade or profession.

The primary health organisation in which I am enrolled has at least five doctors working in it. Yet it, like hundreds of its counterparts in every suburb of every city and town, is locked up tight on weekends and public holidays. The way they behave you'd think no one got sick except on weekdays.

There is no reason I can see why at least two of the doctors working in such medical centres, and their essential staff, should not be rostered to work on weekends and public holidays turn and turn about.

So there, Mr Ryall, is your immediate answer: make it a condition of these PHOs' funding they provide adequate GP cover in their areas for weekends and public holidays.

Now for the retail trade. I sniggered with contempt when I read the other day that retailers want the Government to impose GST on goods and services bought over the internet. One of them even went as far as to burble on about the joys of personal shopping.

What joys are those? In most retail stores these days, there is no pleasure in browsing because none of the shop assistants, except in specialist departments, seems to have the faintest idea about the products he or she is supposed to be "selling". All they know how to do is take your money.

But that's by the by. Most people buy on the internet because it saves a considerable amount of money and they get more information and better service from the likes of Amazon.com in the United States than they would get in most retail shops today.

I have been buying books by the dozen from Amazon.com for years and the service they provide keeps me buying. I can, for instance, buy the latest and most popular fiction, in hardback or paperback, for little more than half the price I would pay in our bookshops - and that's after including the exchange rate and freight.

I trust this website completely. They have even credited my credit card for sums as small as $1.23 because the price of the book I ordered had gone down between receipt of my order and the date it was posted.

Then there's New Zealand's own Trade Me upon which many a good bargain, from houses to cars to household items, can be found. I used to resell my Amazon books on Trade Me but, since early last year, I've been giving them to the Rotorua Public Library after the illiterate Philistines who run the district council cut the library's already inadequate book-buying funds.

And then there's cricket. All the glee which was derived from the inglorious humiliation of the Aussies by the Poms has been well and truly spoiled by the performance of late of our own Black Caps.

While England, if you'll pardon the pun, have risen from the Ashes and are once more a force to be reckoned with in international cricket, and the Aussies are in bewildered disarray, the Black Caps' latest ignominious surrender, to Pakistan in the first test at Hamilton, is a painful embarrassment to every Kiwi cricket-lover.

That follows a whitewash by the lowly-rated Bangladesh and by potent India in the 50-over game.

The well-fought draws with India in two test matches are too far back for us to make any allowances.

Our top-order batsmen lack courage, patience and judgment and must be a grave disappointment to new coach John Wright, who had all of those qualities in abundance. The spectacle of Ross Taylor, bought for $1.3 million by an Indian IPL team one day and the next dropping a routine slips catch that any half-awake schoolboy would have taken, then getting out for very little, might give us some idea of the problem.

Perhaps today's cricketers are so besotted with money that they have forgotten their duty to their team and their country.