Hague Kevin: Reports — Inquiry into Improving Child Health Outcomes and Preventing Child Abuse with a Focus from Preconception Until Three Years of Age (Volumes 1 and 2)Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Reports — Inquiry into Improving Child Health Outcomes and Preventing Child Abuse with a Focus from Preconception Until Three Years of Age (Volumes 1 and 2)[Sitting date: 10 December 2013. Volume:695;Page:15461. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): It is my pleasure—my genuine pleasure—to take a call in this debate on the report of the Health Committee. I want to begin by thanking our officials from the Ministry of Health all of those who made submissions—there weresome extremely good submissions and there were some not so good—and also those who gave us advice. I think particularly about those advisers and officials whom we went back to time and again to get it right. This was a long inquiry and I believe the report that has emerged has been a comprehensive one.There is something about children that perhaps has enabled the extraordinary cross-party approach that we have been able to take in this report. I think it may be because when we consider children up to the age of 3 and think about all of the things that might go wrong in their lives to that point nothing is ever the fault of those children. So whichever political party whichever political philosophy we come from we are able to agree on the need for us to do things that will make the lives of those children better and we were able to do so.One of the abstractions I guess that we made in this report was a recognition that in order to make the lives of those children better we could not focus solely on services targeting those particular children; we actually also needed to look at almost a life course approach recognising that the circumstances and the lives of the adults in the lives of those children have a profound effect on those kids. We also recognised and it is woven right through this report that the impact of the wider environment—the social environment the economic environment the physical environment—that those kids live in actually has a profound effect also.We had an interesting approach to building this report each of the members of the Health Committee taking particular chapters. The particular ones that I put effort into were around sexual and reproductive health and around nutrition and obesity-related disease. I am certainly proud of those chapters as I am of the whole report. It seems extraordinary to me that we have for example allowed until this point a situation where we know what best-practice sexuality education looks like in schools and yet we have not insisted that all schools implement that best-practice education. I think we are now ready to move on.In relation to obesity and obesity prevention I think one of the things that we learnt going through this inquiry was something that we remark on in the report which was that there is no silver bullet—not one that we are aware of anyway. There is no intervention for which there is comprehensive evidence of success. I draw on the comments Dr Hutchison made in his opening contribution in this debate around what Heckman’s analysis tells us about the importance of early intervention in the life of a child in order to have the greatest impact. What that says to us is that when we become aware of an issue the sooner we can intervene in that the better. What that compels us to in so many of these issues is an understanding that we will not have perfect evidence but that the urgency of the issue compels us to act in the absence of perfect evidence and to gather the evidence as we move on so we implement great evaluation frameworks around the things that we do.I want to finish by commenting on the extraordinary step of this debate in the House. I thank the Business Committee—the extraordinary consensus of the committee. I thank in particular as others have done our chair of the Health Committee Dr Paul Hutchison because his commitment has enabled an extraordinary result as we have seen by the universally positive responses of the news media of the specialists and of the Children’s Commissioner to our report. This is a great report. I look forward to the Government implementing it.