PM who put his people’s health first
Joe Williams was a boy on Aitutaki, in the Cook Islands, in 1950 when he won a scholarship to attend school in New Zealand. He owned two pairs of shorts – one for Sunday, and one for the rest of the week.
When it came time to leave the island for New Zealand, he hid under a pile of leaves and garden waste to avoid being shipped off. The three-day trip on the flying-boat via Samoa and Fiji was his first plane ride. When he splashed down at Auckland’s Mechanics Bay, he was wearing his first pair of shoes.
Ten years later, Joe Williams graduated from Otago University with a medical degree. In the meantime he had been head boy and dux at Northland College, performed medical residencies in places like Waimate, Dannevirke and Napier, married and had a baby daughter.
Duty took him back to Rarotonga in 1964, where he became a doctor and the medical superintendent at the hospital on the main island, and director of health and secretary of social services. He told of raising hell when he found that too much of his day was taken up with writing prescriptions for ‘‘medicinal’’ alcohol. He got the rules changed.
By the time he completed a masters in public health at the University of Hawai’i in 1969, the Cook Islands had become independent from New Zealand, establishing its own governance and Parliament. It was the first step in what today we call decolonisation, though Williams never used that word. Again, duty called: the Cook Islands’ first premier, Sir Albert Henry, asked Williams to come home and represent Aitutaki in Parliament.
He became minister of health and minister of education. Later, as the Auckland-based overseas MP in the Cooks Island Parliament, he was minister of health, transport, tourism and stateowned enterprises.
He became prime minister of the Cook Islands in 1999. The job included representing the country at the South Pacific Forum in Palau, but lasted less than four months.
Williams’ biggest impact was in public health. From the beginning at Rarotonga Hospital, he saw many cases of elephantiasis – a painful, disfiguring and debilitating swelling of the limbs. It is a symptom of lymphatic filariasis, caused by a blood parasite spread by mosquitos.
Williams and his colleagues pioneered a mass treatment programme in the Cook Islands that is now the World Health Organisation’s gold standard to eliminate filariasis in whole populations. The disease is officially eliminated from much of the Pacific. He also researched obesity and prostate cancer in Pacific people.
Over the decades, Williams served on the executive board of the WHO and with various organisations and projects aimed at solving public health problems in New Zealand, the Pacific and the developing world. He was patron of the region-wide Pasifika Medical Association, and among his honours are the Queen’s Service Medal and being made a Companion of the Queen’s Service Order in 2011.
Leaders take risks. Williams was the health minister who, in 1977, invited the ultimately discredited cancer therapist Milan Brych to the Cook Islands after he was banned from practising in New Zealand. There was more controversy in 2002 when Williams proposed, unsuccessfully, that the Cook Islands host human trials to show whether implanting pig cells in humans might treat diabetes.
Three years ago, the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal fined him $10,000 and restricted his practice for ‘‘inappropriate and/or excessive’’ prescribing of a bespoke steroid and antifungal mixture to treat eczema. The community rose up in support, and social media tributes this week after his death include countless anecdotes of lives changed from his eczema treatments. His was a holistic programme that included dietary advice and what patients call ‘‘Dr Joe’s magic cream’’.
Williams’ final goal in life was to see eczema eliminated just as filariasis can be. ‘‘The world is built on dreams,’’ he said in an interview in 2015. ‘‘If you have a dream, pursue it. Don’t give up until it becomes a reality.’’
Williams was not one of those public men who sacrifice their families for global causes. He lived his final years in a large family compound with his wife, daughter and grandchildren. Whether it was a young relative he was stitching up after a fall, a patient with a medical complaint, or a colleague needing a reminder of their mission and potential, ‘‘he had a way of making people feel safe’’, recalls his eldest daughter, Karin.
The family remembers fishing with him in the lagoon at Arorangi in Rarotonga, where he turned the backyard into a market garden. Earnings from exporting fresh fruit and vegetables paid for the secondary schooling in Auckland of the eldest son, Richard – with the senior Williams working full-time at the hospital all the while.
Even at the age of 85, Joe Williams could never answer the question ‘‘But what would I do if I retire?’’ So he worked until the end. He conducted online consultations with his patients throughout this year’s level 4 Covid-19 lockdown, and returned to face-to-face appointments as soon as they were allowed. He saw a full roster of patients at his Mt Wellington clinic only two days before he fell sick with Covid-19 in the middle of August.
As always, he had been in the garden several times that week, growing vegetables for the family and for the grandchildren’s menagerie of guinea pigs, rabbits and birds. A recent photo shows Joe with a spade and wheelbarrow in the garden of his Auckland home, wearing gumboots and old clothes. ‘‘Don’t put that on Facebook,’’ he said.
Williams died a few weeks before the 50th anniversary of his marriage to Jill,
who manages the clinic. He is also survived by children Karin, Richard, Joanna and Jamie, and by six grandchildren ranging from 4 to 21 years.
Memorial services were held this week in Aitutaki, Avarua, Brisbane and Hastings. Flags flew at half-mast all week in Rarotonga before today’s national memorial service. A public service will be held in Auckland in October when Covid19 restrictions allow. The Pasifika Medical Association is planning a scholarship fund in his name.
‘‘The world is built on dreams. If you have a dream, pursue it. Don’t give up until it becomes a reality.’’ Joe Williams in 2015
Sources: The Williams family, World Health Organisation, Pasifika Medical Association, Office of the Cook Islands Prime Minister (Cook Islands), Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (New Zealand), NZ Medical Association, Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal, Cook Islands News, Pacific Islands Monthly, NZ Herald, East and Bays Courier
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