King AnnetteHon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour): I am so pleased to be able to speak in the third reading of this debate at a very important time of night when so many people are listening to this debate. But I am so disappointed with the contribution from the National Party. It has been half-hearted lacklustre and fact-free. I think that Paddy Gower has finally got it right—they are on the way out. They are on the way out. I want to take a serious look at this Budget because it deserves a serious contribution in the House today. I want to look at the health budget of 2016. All those members opposite who are filling the seats over there I want them to take notice of some of the facts I am going to give them because they are not mine; they are independent facts about the health of our nation. This Budget in my view was a missed opportunity. It was full of half-baked ideas. There was wilful neglect and there was a lot of political grandstanding. It was a budget that had plenty of doctored figures with a combination of smoke and mirrors. Vote Health needed $635 million to keep up with demographics and cost pressure. What it got was $579 million and a whole heap of political grandstanding. Of that $579 million district health boards (DHBs) where the services are provided got $400 million. Minus the $11 million taken off their baseline to pump up the Pharmac budget it comes to $389 million minus $89 million that they have to find in efficiencies. The ministry provided the Health Committee with an answer to the actual cost pressures just a few weeks ago. They started at $489 million just in the DHBs. What we have got from this Government is a lot of hype about how much money it has put into health but it has not met the cost pressures and demographic growth of this country. In a desperate attempt to cover up 8 years of failure in the health budget Jonathan Coleman got his hapless leadership of the Ministry of Health to produce the biggest con in figures that I have seen for a long time. Jonathan Coleman claimed that funding for health over National's time in Government was ahead of all cost pressures. Well I have to tell you that the health sector fell about laughing before weeping. Treasury fell about in despair at such incompetence with the health figures and the patients—well they just fell over waiting for their hip their knee and their eye operations. You see Jonathan Coleman's figures did not include ageing or the wage costs that come from multi-employer agreements that make up the health sector: the doctors the nurses the allied health services etc. So here we had a Minister of Health trying to con the public that there was more money in health over 8 years under this Government. That is demonstrably untrue. I have to say that I was pleased that Treasury itself recognised that the way this Government was adding up the figures was not the way they are counted by it or by anybody else. Then we got to wilful neglect by Dr Coleman. For months GPs have called on the Government for additional funding for primary healthcare. They wanted to see improved access. They spoke of the growing inequities and the rising costs of doctors visits that have happened in the 8 years of this Government. When Labour left power the average cost of a doctor's visit was $29. It had been brought down under a Labour Government by investing into primary healthcare over half a billion dollars to make it fair and equitable and easy to access. Today it is $40 and up to $70 per visit for people to go to their GP. The Government was warned that these increases in costs that patients were facing and the lack of additional funding were going to mean that GPs were going to be putting up their prices. I found it interesting to watch Dr Tim Molloy somebody whom the Minister himself respects and whom I have great respect for—he is the president of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners—who said: Having to decide whether you eat or go to the doctor is actually a reality." It is actually a reality today. Why I am raising this is that the Minister had the ability to seek additional funding for primary healthcare. In fact Treasury urged him to seek additional funding for primary healthcare. I happen to have Treasury's Budget-sensitive document here. This was in February when it started urging the Minister of Health to apply for more money in the Budget for primary healthcare. It says: "This briefing provides our … views on work underway to improve access to primary health care for high needs populations. … The 2014/15 New Zealand Health Survey results released in December … indicate that access is still a significant issue. There is still a prevalence of 27% for rates of adults experiencing unmet need for primary health care. There continue to be higher rates of unmet need for Maori and those … most socioeconomically deprived areas." It went on to say: "We are supportive of changes to improve outcomes for those with high need" and "We understand that issues with access and funding arrangements have been known in the sector for some time and we think the sector needs to show … urgency to resolve them. We [have] pushed [the ministry] to prepare something on [very low cost access] in time for the Budget … the Ministry has not signalled anything [yet]." It never signalled anything and the Minister never signalled anything. He never sought additional funding for primary healthcare. That is going to mean if you listen to ProCare Health the biggest primary health organisation (PHO) in New Zealand that it is going to do what it calls "cap busting". That means it intends to bust the cap that is on the price you pay because it cannot afford to continue to provide primary healthcare. What I found pretty disappointing was to have the Associate Minister of Health the Hon Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga in the House this week when answering a question about funding for primary healthcare stand up and say that $25 million extra had gone into primary healthcare in answer to my question of what went into reducing doctors' fees and reducing inequalities. Not one of those dollars goes into doing that and he knew that and in this House he was making it sound like that money had gone in to reduce the cost of primary healthcare. Dr Andrew Miller is the chair of the Manaia PHO. He said this is "an appalling inequity entirely unethical and illogical." That is what he has said about the Government's approach to primary healthcare and I think it pretty well sums up the Minister as well. Then we get to wilful neglect. There has been wilful neglect of mental health in this Budget. There is a lack of funding that has gone into mental health in this country. You see the reports of failures. You see the cuts in services. You see the staff lay-offs. You see the police frustration at having to pick mental health patients off the street and take them to the emergency departments of hospitals and you see emergency departments right around New Zealand saying they are being inundated with acute mental health patients. It is wilful neglect of a very important part as well. Finally we come to the half-baked ideas. We hear that this Government is going to continue with its social bond experiment. It has wasted millions of dollars with no results—no providers willing to get into bed with it and no bank willing to put up a dollar to run a crazy scheme where it is going to have the banks fund mental health patients getting a job and if the providers who are not the banks manage to get them into a job then the bank gets a dividend. What did the banks want? They wanted to make sure that all risk was taken away from them. It was a social experiment that has wasted millions that could have gone straight into the provision of mental health services and primary health services. I have not even got to those poor people out there who are living with sore knees and hips and one eye needing a cataract because the Government will not do two of them. These are the people who want a health system that provides health services when they need them—when they need them—not in sum on the never-never with the Minister saying: "We are doing more because we have to do more." I will come back to that issue very shortly to show what you can do with bodgie figures."