Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Chair. It's my pleasure to speak in this debate. It's not a pleasure to talk about the issues that we have to discuss but I want to start by acknowledging the chair of the Health Committee Louisa Wall and her very warm comments in support of the tremendous response by the Canterbury District Health Board (DHB) staff in relation to the terror attacks. That's about where we end our agreement.We saw actually the Canterbury District Health Board in February and I think they're a metaphor for the other 20 DHBs and the sea of red ink that our financial review process not revealed—it wasn't easy to find where DHBs were at financially and it still isn't. I want to go into that in a little more detail. But I wasn't actually at the committee when Canterbury came in; I was at the funeral for a friend in Dunedin and watched on Facebook—which is a great asset I have to say; well done to the clerks—and I nearly fell off my chair when I heard David Meates say that they were then projecting the princely sum of $98 million of a deficit from one DHB—just one DHB—and I know it's got worse. The Minister hasn't released the information but the combined Canterbury and West Coast deficits are likely to be in the region of $120 million which is a quite interesting sum because that exceeds the total financial deficits of all of the DHBs just two short years ago. Two short years ago the combined deficits were $119 million and the previous National Government budgeted for the same deficits in 2017-18. That deficit trajectory was well on target until November 2017. About a month into this administration and this Minister and away they went away from budget and they doubled—$240 million in the period of our financial review.As members know the financial review is a look backward and a look forward and the look forward is a tremendously tremendously sad one because by the latest data and this hasn't been updated for a couple of months we are now on track—this is the official number—for $344 million. Actually I'm convinced that it's going to be higher than that and indeed sources that I have have informed me that that my estimate of $500 million of combined deficits is conservative. So as we review financial performance it is impossible to overlook the fact that under this Government these DHBs are sinking in a sea of red.Now most of us would be able to tolerate that accept that with as much good grace as we can muster—particularly it would have to take quite a bit of grace for this chartered accountant to say that was a good thing in the long run—if indeed more health outputs were accruing as a consequence of that deficit but actually the opposite is happening.Hon Nathan Guy: Well what's happened to the health targets?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Well who would know? Now that's a very good question Mr Guy because I'm not sure now whether the Minister knows whether his Government has targets or not. The Ministry of Health web page says that the target for elective surgery is 4000 more than the previous year and that would suggest that they would have to do based on the data the ministry has about 153000 procedures this year. They are by my calculations about 8000 behind that target and 6500 behind the year-to-date figure just to stand still. Yet in another part of the Ministry of Health website the targets have been removed.Actually I thought the Minister was being a little bit tricky with information because we haven't had the financials updated since January. We should be at least at March and knowing whether my prediction of half a billion dollars of fiscal deficits is correct. Now I don't think he's being evasive with the information; I just don't think he has any sense of what's going on in his portfolio or in his ministry. It's going to elective surgery it's going to cancer treatment waiting times it's going to immunisation rates it's going to things like the response to meningococcal and everywhere we saw of the 10 DHBs—which were very representative of all 20 of them I have to say—uncertainty about what to do in the face of this sea of red ink because they're certainly not getting any support from the Minister who dragged the chairs and the chief executives into Wellington and said Fix it." He didn't say how didn't say why and didn't say what the industrial relations landscape was going to be. All he can do is bark instructions and this is the result. We have a sector and a ministry sinking."