Smith NickHon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson): I find it difficult to take the Government's claims of being concerned about the quality of social and health services when it is systematically removing any of the meaningful targets for delivery of social and other services of which the most recent is the Minister of Health unilaterally abandoning any targets for performance in our public health system.You see in January this year the Government dropped the Better Public Service targets administered by the State Services Commission. These covered important areas like a target to reduce by 10000 the number of New Zealanders that are victims of crime goals like reducing by 20 percent the number of people that are high-priority applicants for social housing things like reducing the number of hospitalisations of children from preventable diseases and things like reducing the number of people that are on long-term welfare. You have to ask the question: why on earth is the Government wanting to remove these performance measures on improvement in areas like health?It's not just health; we're seeing it in education. We're seeing it as highlighted by Chris Bishop in the area of police. Take the area of education being championed by my colleague Nikki Kaye. The Government with great fanfare in January removed the specific national targets on literary and numeracy and has left a vacuum for schools about what they are to do. I had representations from boards of trustees in my own Nelson community this week alarmed at not being able to have in future reliable data on how well their children are doing. And it's not just for parents; it's for boards of trustees it's for principals and it's for ensuring good knowledge about where our Ministry of Education and Education Review Office should be intervening. Equally it applies to the secondary sector where again we're wanting to take away national measures of how well our children are doing in secondary education with the changes around NCEA.Then we come to yesterday's announcements about district health boards (DHBs). We currently require our 20 district health boards to report their performance on six specific health goals—things like improving timeliness of being able to be seen in an emergency department improving access to elective surgery making sure people are getting timely access to cancer treatment improving immunisation rates making sure that we have active smoke-free campaigns and more New Zealanders quitting smoking and improving the health status of our families and children. Why on earth do members opposite want to stop measuring and having targets in those sorts of areas?You see the value of being a local member of Parliament is that I can see how my DHB is doing. I'm hugely proud that the Nelson Marlborough District Health Board ranks amongst the best in terms of progress on emergency department see times but equally I know that my own DHB is not cutting the mustard when it comes to smoking cessation rates. I suggest a key reason for these targets being removed is simply that this Government does not want to be accountable for actually delivering practical results for New Zealanders. We know the last Labour Government increased health funding by 50 percent and at the same time delivered no increase in elective surgeries.Then we come to an area such as police where we had very specific targets: 98 percent of burglaries being dealt with within 48 hours—target removed. Same again in respect of accessibility—no target for rural New Zealanders to access police services. What a contradiction in setting targets on child poverty but removing across the State sector any meaningful measure of how well this Government is doing. It's a shambles it's a disappointment and New Zealanders deserve better.