Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'm feeling tempted to respond to some of the speeches earlier in the day but I'm going to hold it and see if I've got time left at the end because really I wanted to speak about nurses.I'm the daughter of a nurse and I feel as if I have through my mum's experience a bit of an insight into their technical skill and the physicality and the emotional nature of their job. I just have so much respect for the work that they do and I really want to put it on record in this House that they have been historically underpaid and undervalued in our healthcare system. So in the Green Party we believe that our nurses deserve to be paid more. And we support their call for urgent mediation in their pay dispute with the district health boards (DHBs).I want to acknowledge too that what's happening now is in the context as described by Richard Wagstaff of the Council of Trade Unions that around the world there's this wave of action from women who are saying basically that they've had enough of waiting for things to get better and these women are expressing their absolute frustration with the refusal of the system to acknowledge their value. As the quote goes I believe Well-behaved women rarely make history". So I want to acknowledge their efforts in this current time.In my experience nurses are exceptionally professional and their rejection of the DHBs' offer reveals how undervalued they feel after nine years of the health budgets just being squeezed to breathlessness by the previous National Government. So the nurses are standing up for themselves and all women but they're also standing up for us as a society. Nurses are the largest occupational group in our health sector. We have an ageing workforce and an ageing population and an increasingly globalised labour market. If we want a strong and effective healthcare service then we would do well to listen to what the nurses are telling us.I want to recall the interview on Radio New Zealand yesterday with a nurse Kathleen. She's worked as a nurse for eight years and she was saying that she would benefit from the offer with a 15 percent pay rise. But her concern was for junior colleagues because at the moment they would only get 3 percent and they are hearing on a regular basis from junior nurses talking about going to Australia because the pay and the ability to have a decent life looks better over there. She was acknowledging that nurses are working long hours often they're in shift work they're on their feet all day and often they don't get lunch breaks. She's working most weekends and doesn't get to have a decent life and is struggling from pay cheque to pay cheque. And that is on top of increased complexity of their work and the fact that many days they are verbally and physically assaulted in their work.The nurses are telling us that we need to pay attention as a country to ensure that people want to go into this work and stay in this work. The Green Party thank them for their efforts for us to understand that and for us to have a strong healthcare system that we can all rely on when we need it. It's becoming clearer and clearer that the previous Government patched up efforts around health—where they neglected the buildings; where we have mould in the walls of Middlemore and asbestos in Dunedin—and they have been underpaying the staff and that has put us to the point of crisis.When we hear Simon Bridges say that he's standing by the nurses but he just doesn't think that they deserve more pay I challenge Mr Bridges to go to a protest of nurses and stand there with a placard and say "Nurses don't deserve more pay." because that's effectively what the leader of the National Party has been saying. The Green Party supports—we recognise it may not happen overnight but we thank the nurses for their challenge."