King Annette: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 02 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11645. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour): What is that old saying? It goes something like “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”—and that is exactly what we got from the senior Government whip where all he could do was bellow and be bombastic.There was so little in the Budget the Government members have taken to splitting their votes because they cannot fill in the whole 5 minutes. They are struggling to fill in 5 minutes so what do they do? They spend the 5 minutes that they have got talking about us. Well thank you very much; we are very happy for you to talk about the Opposition because we are doing such a damned good job. So carry on—devote all your speeches to the Opposition. The Labour Party is very happy about it. I know the Greens and New Zealand First will be. We have no problem with you talking about us.There is another saying I think it goes: “There are statistics damn statistics and lies.” Well I have to say there are none more so than in the health portfolio.Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. It is unparliamentary to imply that lies are being told.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I do not need any assistance with this. Please take your seat. [Interruption] Please take your seat Minister. The honourable member gave a quote. If he wants to apply that to himself he is welcome to but she was completely within the Standing Orders.Hon ANNETTE KING: Thank you Mr Speaker. Thank you very much. Week after week the hapless Minister of Health stands up in this Parliament and he denies he denigrates and he ducks questions put to him about the Government’s performance in health. You know he is brilliant at statistical gymnastics: he is great at the backflip he is very good at the forward roll he is a contortionist and he is the con man of health. And you see—Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. You know what it is about.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I do not need any assistance there. If it has escaped the Minister that this is a fairly robust debate then you know I feel sorry that he is at that loss. But to suggest that you are a con man—as the Minister obviously did—you may well take offence at that. If you have taken offence you may well seek a withdrawal and apology. I would suggest that you are a little bit more robust than that.Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: Sorry I take offence at terms such as “liars” and “con man”. Yes I do. [Interruption]Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I have ruled on the lies. If you take offence at the veiled accusation re a “con man” no doubt the Hon Annette King will withdraw it.Hon ANNETTE KING: I will withdraw Mr Speaker. I have to say I take offence—Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: It had better be a good point of order.Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: It is. The member has been here for a long 30 years and she knows it is “withdraw and apologise”. You do not just get up and say “withdraw”.Hon ANNETTE KING: Speaking to the point of order Mr Deputy Speakeryou did not ask me to apologise; you asked me to withdraw. I withdrew.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: It is entirely over to the Speaker as to what he requires. There was no suggestion that she apologise. The instruction was that she withdraw and she did that. We will not have any more frivolous points of order that are aimed at breaking up a speech. I recall that the Minister himself got a pretty good go.Hon ANNETTE KING: Thank you very much Mr Deputy Speaker. I have to say that I am offended week after week day after day at the performance of the Minister of Health. Dr Coleman has just picked up where Tony Ryall left off. You see it works like this: blame blame again and then blame some more. But 8 years on the blame game has become National’s shame. It has become National’s shame. They have run out of excuses they have run out of places to hide because the truth is out. After 8 National Governments—their National health budgets—$1.72 billion of cumulative underfunding has occurred; $1.72 billion. And in this Budget $50 million is missing from the overall health budget. To make it worse when you drill down and look at the district health board (DHB) budget $140 million is missing in real terms.Those are not my figures they are from Infometrics’ updated report replicating the Treasury model from its fiscal strategy model. It takes demographics and inflationary cost pressures and uses these to calculate the real growth in core Crown health expenditure. So if Dr Coleman does not like the figures then he should produce his own model and tell New Zealanders what is really happening in health. You see what Infometrics does is take the demographics calculated by using the 2009-10 health cost weights and apply this to the population data from the Budget 2016 fiscal model. Then when it looks at the average inflation growth it is calculated from the previous year and the forecast from the Budget 2016 fiscal model. So that means that the Treasury calculation used in the demographic growth is extremely extremely conservative. What you get out of that when you put it together in the same way that Treasury does is that the real growth in core Crown health expenditure is only 0.4 percent.Hon Member: How much?Hon ANNETTE KING: It is 0.4 percent—and that is why health does not have sufficient money. [Interruption] So every day when the hapless backbenchers along with their Minister come in here and read out their skite sheet of health achievements they are increasingly laughed at by the public of New Zealand—the ones who live in daily pain and disability and who are missing out on health services.But I do feel a little pity for the Minister of Health because the well of excuses is exhausted and he is now resorting to tinkering around the edges of truth. Take mental health: he claimed that DHBs have $568 million allocated to them so part of it could go to mental health. Did health get $568 million for DHBs; would the Minister of Health not know his own budget? No health did not—it got $400 million. Take off the $11 million it must put into Pharmac’s budget and you are down to $389 million. Now we hear that they are going to have to pay part of the cost of the bowel-screening programme roll-out. So you can see why our DHBs are underfunded.The Government has no idea what is happening in mental health. Many of those members opposite are constituency members and I cannot believe that they have not had people come to their constituency offices telling them about problems in mental health. If they have not then they are not performing their role as constituency MPs: their doors are not open to listen to what people say. All of us—including members who are list members from the Opposition—have heard these stories day after day of the crisis in mental health. So if you do not want to believe your constituents have a look at the recent reports on mental health failure: Northland DHB—a report into a terrible failure in mental health; MidCentral DHB and Capital and Coast DHB are under review right now because of the number of suicides; Waikato DHB Canterbury DHB—these are major reviews and reports showing failures in our mental health system.Let us look at the major announcement in the Budget: the bowel-screening programme. Everyone knows that we have one of the highest rates of bowel cancer in the world—3000 cases registered every year about 1200 deaths every year. In 2007 the then Minister of Health and David Cunliffe announced the roll-out of a bowel-screening programme that would start in 2008-09. The Minister in an answer in the House today said: “Well Labour announced it in 2007 and they didn’t implement it in 2008.” We lost Government in 2008 so why did this Government not pick up the roll-out of the bowel-screening programme and implement it? The Minister said today that 700 lives a year would be saved if this programme was in place. In other words 6300 lives could have been saved if the Government had rolled out the bowel-screening programme when it was announced.Did it start where the highest incidence and the highest death rate is for bowel cancer in the southern part of New Zealand? No. Within days of the Budget announcement—with a quick phone call or two to two little DHBs—the Minister announced a roll-out. Had it been to Cabinet Cabinet Ministers? Has the case for the bowel-screening programme gone to Cabinet? No it has not. I have not before heard of an announcement where there is a big-ticket item and dollars attached to it that has not gone through a Cabinet process. That is not Cabinet government to make such an announcement—National was desperate to make an announcement before the Budget.So you have now got what I call the “McColeman announcement”—that is the announcement you have when you do not really have an announcement. There is a problem with it: Treasury has given it a red flag; it is very worried about the implementation. So what does the Minister do today? He goes on radio and slags off all the Treasury officers—the very Treasury officers whose forecasts the Minister of Finance stands up in this House every day and tells us that we have got to believe. It had “decades of deficits”—we were meant to believe that.Brett Hudson: Thanks to you Annette.Hon ANNETTE KING: We were meant to believe those Treasury forecasts but we are not meant to believe Mr Hudson that Treasury said the roll-out of the bowel-screening programme is a crock at this stage and gave it a red flag. You see you would like it both ways I think Mr Hudson.So where in this Budget is the funding to honour the promises that were made to our older people? Where is the money to pay for home care? Where is the money to pay for the minimum wage increase for all those wonderful women who look after our old people in their homes? Do you know that for 7 years—7 years—the providers of home-care services have not had funding to account for the increase in the minimum wage? I have got their report—these are not my words—for 7 years they have not had funding to pay for the increase in the minimum wage and that has eroded over $7 million a year from their provision of services for our old people. They deserve better do they not? Our old people deserve the best possible care in their own homes.This Budget is a flop and a failure and that is why the Government cannot talk about it.