Roy Heather: Official Information (Openness of District Health Boards New Zealand) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Roy Heather: Official Information (Openness of District Health Boards New Zealand) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:641;Page:11196] 
HEATHER ROY (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 Like other members of this House I rise to speak to the Official Information (Openness of District Health Boards New Zealand) Amendment Bill and I say I am very pleased with the outcome. Along with the other members who have already done so I would like to congratulate Dr Jackie Blue on bringing this bill to the House. Despite the fact that every party will vote against the bill tonight she has achieved a significant move forward in terms of openness transparency and accountability in our health sector and it is long overdue. I will come to some examples in that area where we are sadly lacking but I say that this move tonight is a very important one. 
Just before I explore those issues I will take a moment to say that I was quite astounded when the Labour member Sue Moroney stood up. She actually reminded me of a racehorse. I do not know how fast she can move but members can picture racehorses with their blinkers on. Sue Moroney’s ideological blinkers are well and firmly on are they not? 
Kate Wilkinson 
: She’s a trotter. 
HEATHER ROY 
: That is dead right. Those blinkers are well and truly in place and people must have thought on listening to her that this Government has achieved great things in health. She seems to forget that since 1999 this Labour Government has actually achieved nothing in health. It has spent an extra $4.5 billion but has produced not one extra thing. In fact the Government forgets that since 1999 we have had significant population growth. If we take into account population growth since 1999 then look at the extra spending in health and the result of that spending we can see that we have moved backwards. That is not something that anybody in this House should be proud of. 
So openness transparency and accountability are the winners here tonight. The Labour member Sue Moroney said District Health Boards New Zealand was a wonderful organisation because of the advice and support that it has given to district health boards. Well how would we know that? It has never been accountable and it has never been transparent. Who knows what actually happens behind those closed doors? It is shameful in fact that when District Health Boards New Zealand was set up it did not have responsibilities under the Official Information Act implicit in its operations in the first place. 
It is all very well for Sue Moroney to stand up and say that Jackie Blue’s bill was useless. It was not useless; it has achieved a great victory here today. The bill is not useless because when was this Government which has now been in power for almost 9 years ever going to bring forward the regulation that is now coming before this House because of this bill? It was never going to do that. This Government does not want to know what happens in the health sector because then it would have to be accountable for it. There are numerous examples of a lack of openness a lack of transparency and a lack of accountability or whatever one wants to call it. Every party in this House including Labour which has not exhibited any of those qualities while in Government likes to claim victory for them. The fact is that patients should be able to expect openness transparency and accountability but they cannot. 
I will highlight three examples of the way our health sector is certainly not open transparent or accountable. The first is that when I first came to Parliament I used to send off an Official Information Act request to Treasury every quarter and ask for the productivity reports of the provider arms of the district health boards. Those were very enlightening reports. They looked at how much money had gone into the provider arms and they tried to make some sort of assessment—it has never been easy—as to the productivity of those provider arms. The results were quite shocking. I went to do one of my regular Official Information Act requests about 2 years ago. The response came back that—guess what—those reports were no longer being done. A cynic might think that those reports had been stopped because the Government did not want me or anyone in the National Party to put out a press release saying that productivity was down yet again—that population growth was up but that productivity was down and that the huge amounts of taxpayer money provided for health had gone yet again into a big black hole. We need to know in this House where that money goes. But more important patients who are sitting at home in pain those who are sick and waiting for operations or treatment and all those who are on waiting lists—waiting waiting waiting forever—need to know exactly what the extra money that is being poured into the health sector on their behalf has actually achieved. 
My second example is a finding in an OECD report that came out in 2005. It was a very thorough report that looked at the big areas of Government spending. Tucked away at the very back of the report was half a page on the New Zealand public health sector. Given that one in five dollars of taxpayer contributions goes into the health sector one would think that the report would be more than half a page in length. But the conclusion that the OECD report writers came to was that there was insufficient documentation and insufficient information available presumably from our Ministry of Health for the OECD to be able to come to any conclusion about the state of New Zealand’s public health sector. I would contend that this Government should not be proud of that. We never hear about that OECD report—the Government does not want it to be publicised—but given that we are spending one in every five dollars of taxpayers’ money on health we should have some idea of what those funds are being spent on. 
 My third example concerns waiting lists and in particular waiting list exit categories. I also did a bit of research at the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005 about the exit categories from waiting lists. I was interested in the number of people who had been returned to their general practitioners the number of people who had given up on the public sector and had gone privately and the number of people who had died while they were on a waiting list waiting for treatment. Those figures were quite staggering particularly the figure for the deaths of patients on waiting lists. In the 2 years from 2002-04 the number of people who had died while waiting for a procedure on a public hospital waiting list increased by 40 percent. That sounded alarm bells in my head. I thought that could not be right and I asked myself why if the figure was correct that increase was happening. Any responsible Government would have asked why that was happening and would have looked into the situation very thoroughly because that figure is staggering and is worth investigating. But no that did not happen. 
There had previously been 10 exit categories including patients who had been returned to a general practitioner’s care because the public hospital sector was not able to cope with the request patients who had gone privately because the public sector was not able to provide a procedure or treatment and patients who had died while on the waiting list. As a result of my publicising the fact that those deaths had increased by 40 percent the Ministry of Health instead of looking into the situation decided—and I expect there was some input from the Minister’s office—to decrease the number of exit categories from 10 to four. The number of people returned to a general practitioner’s care the number of people who had gone privately and the number of deaths of people on waiting lists were all jumbled into one list so that nobody could see exactly what was happening in our public health sector. 
Those are three examples of the very reasons that Jackie Blue’s bill was needed and that is why she has had a great victory on behalf of this Parliament today. As a result of this bill we will have a little more openness transparency and accountability in the health sector. This Government has a long long way to go when we talk about those three things but this bill is a step in the right direction. This entire House instead of berating this move should congratulate Jackie Blue tonight. Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker.