Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. Call me Nostradamus but I predict—Kieran McAnulty: OK Nostradamus. How you going Nostradamus?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Thank you very much. Because I predict that somebody is going to come down to this House and make a correction and an apology and my question is: is it going to be the Hon David Clark or the Rt Hon Winston Peters? Two things cannot both be true at the same time. In response to a question from the Leader of the Opposition the Hon Simon Bridges Mr Peters said in regard to health targets well the Hon David Clark came along with a system and plan and policies of hope to improve public health and Cabinet members agreed with him." Then David Clark told me in question 8 "[The] matter did not need to go to Cabinet." Both of those things can't be true. So either people are being forgetful—possibly asleep in Cabinet; you never know. But both of those two things cannot be correct. Mr Peters' comment is most interesting when he says the policies are policies of hope. That's it: we hope things get better in the health sector. Well in the National Government and as a matter of fact in the previous Labour Government—the Clark Government—hope wasn't good enough; targets were. Right across the country in every national daily paper every few months was this chart that I'm holding and it was read very very carefully by people down my way and I expect right across the country. It's entitled "How is my DHB performing?" and it has the quarterly results for things that matter to New Zealanders matter to constituents: shorter stays in emergency departments improved access to elective surgery cancer treatment waiting times immunisation smoking cessation and raising healthy kids. Mr Clark decides that they're not good enough—they have perverse incentives. Well he should firstly do a bit of research about the origins of these because he said in question time in respect of the diabetes targets the former National Government had "targets for childhood obesity that measured the number of times someone is referred not if they're getting … better." Well actually that's not true. That was a target of the previous Labour Government and this document I'm holding is the document released I am interested to note by Dr Clark's predecessor Mr Pete Hodgson. He introduced the diabetes target that the National Government got rid of because we agreed with Dr Clark that it wasn't tight enough. Let's have a look at the results that occurred when those targets were being monitored and measured and published to the public. Emergency department waiting times—the best independent academic research by the University of Waikato says that 700 lives were saved—Hon Member: How many?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: —700 lives were saved every year by setting a target of no more than six hours' waiting time in the emergency department. If that's a perverse incentive I'll take it. Immunisation rates—up from 63 percent to 92 percent. The document that the previous Labour Government put in place talked about Māori and Pasifika inequalities. Well the really important part of the immunisation target was that Māori and Pasifika immunisation rates were higher than non-Māori and that is an outstanding achievement by our health authorities. Case-weighted discharges went up massively elective surgery went up and Dr Clark talks about "Oh well they were eye injections some of them." Well in his part of the country in the Southern District Health Board people were going blind because of disorganisation in the eye department at Dunedin Hospital and he says that an eye injection is not important. Well I bet it was important to those people with macular degeneration who did go blind and should not have. What I don't understand is how inconsistent these targets are. We've lost national standards we've lost all of the Better Public Services targets and now the health targets are not important to this Government. But somehow child poverty reduction is so important that the Prime Minister when she was in Opposition and was spokesperson for social development decried the previous National Government for not having a single target—a target that could be measured and published and endure across Governments. The only pattern that I can see out of the inconsistency is that anything the National Government did this Government is going to undo and anything that it does is great and the right thing to do but not when the previous Government did it. That is a real shame. It's an ideological nonsense and it has to stop."