White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. I want to talk from my perspective as a new MP. I came in and I went into two select committees. One is the Finance and Expenditure Committee and the other is the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and what I have been absolutely pleased to see is that what we do firmly always looks forward. It isn't something where we are stuck in the present or the past; we are looking always to a better future. So I've done things like met people like the Infrastructure Commission and the Green Investment Fund and those bodies have been set up specifically to make sure that we actually doing that work. This was a very interesting report because it looked at that perspective of 40 years and it was something which contrasted with some of the behaviour I'd seen in the interviews that we'd done etc. from the Opposition because I firmly come to the conclusion that what was going on was there was a living as if there was no tomorrow. There was a platitude—there were lots of platitudes. There were lots of things like We are for investment in electric vehicles." but actually then there was a crying out of material which was "No no we can't go this fast. We can't do it this way. It's a tax." etc. Every impediment that could be put up was put up to actually moving towards that sustainable future and it worries me because it is of concern that that is what the New Zealand public are being told.Now my experience was also in Auckland where I had seen what had happened to transport because people hadn't thought forward. In fact one way of looking at this is to look back and to say "Forty years ago what should Auckland have done?" What Auckland should have done is it should have had a decent public transport system and it should have invested in it. One of the things that was absolutely a lesson for us all was our health system because what we had in our health system when I arrived in the early part of my involvement in 2017 in the Auckland campaign was we had decrepit hospitals. We had hospitals where there was water dripping from the roof when people were trying to conduct a surgery. That was utterly unsustainable. And what we have now is a report that we are looking at which talks about that. Not only does it talk about building up and reforming the health system as being an absolute priority for the 40-year future but it also talks about the connections of that health of our people with all the other parts of our economy. It makes the connections in the report about things like actually the state of our houses. I remember in that 2017 campaign I talked to Dr David Geller and it was one of those things I'll never forget because he had worked in health for a long time—I think he'd just become New Zealander of the Year. He talked about how chronic health had been an issue. So he started his career in health looking at trauma because people would come in with an accident and by the time I was talking to him in 2017 it was all about chronic health issues because people were living in damp conditions. The children had rheumatic fever. Those are consequences that we will see play out for the next 40 years. So all these things are interconnected and this report actually points that out and it talks about responses and it talks about the absolute social contract that we have in health—that now people understand how important it is. After all I think it's not a coincidence that it comes from the Labour benches that connection because it is about understanding the connection between people. That's a fundamental ideal of Labour—that connection between people no matter how much they earn. Whereas if you earn lots if you are on $180000-plus it's very easy to forget that connection between people that actually it's going to be OK for you because at the end of the day you can write a cheque. Unfortunately most of the country can't write the cheque. They need a health system that actually does produce and I think we've finally got a handle on it. I think we're talking about equity rather than equality. We're talking about actually providing people with equitable outcomes. I commend that response. Thank you Madam Speaker."