Ryall Tony: New Zealand Public Health and Disability (Enhancement of Competition) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Ryall Tony: New Zealand Public Health and Disability (Enhancement of Competition) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:629;Page:1825] 
Hon TONY RYALL (National—Bay of Plenty) 
: 
 If everything is so good with Pharmac why does it rate only 5½ out of 10? That is the mark the Minister of Health gave Pharmac in the House during question time yesterday. I think that is one of the reasons why Mrs Roy has brought this bill to the House. 
National does want to be associated with a debate on this Government’s management of drug buying in this country. I can tell the House this: that the Minister talks about cost effectiveness but the biggest beneficiary of cost effectiveness under this system has been the Government. I can tell the House this: that per head of population spending on pharmaceuticals in this country has been dropping every year in the last 4 or 5 years. That is not something that the Government should be proud of. 
So National thinks it is opportune to debate the role and function of Pharmac and the output of drug policy by this Government for this reason: there is incredible discomfort in this country about how medicines policy is being run. Hundreds of people have marched to Parliament to express frustration at the funding of our drug-buying policy in New Zealand. We have seen Dave Bowman and other people needing the drug Temozolomide come to Parliament and present a petition of their concerns about Government underfunding of drug buying in New Zealand. Tomorrow we are to see people concerned about access to the drug Herceptin. Those cases indicate the disquiet there is in this country about our medicines and drug buying policies. Further earlier this year a group called the Access to Medicines Coalition was set up comprising a wide range of organisations including the AIDS Foundation and Alzheimer’s arthritis and asthmatics organisations all wanting to promote improved access for medicines. 
Why are we seeing this mobilisation of user opinion happening now? I suspect it is because of the legacy of Labour under-investing in pharmaceuticals year in year out. I have said before that per head of population spending on pharmaceuticals in this country has been dropping. So at the last election the National Party made a commitment that we would boost the budget for pharmaceuticals by $25 million. That would have made a difference to a whole lot of New Zealanders. It would have meant that we were no longer falling behind our own standards on a per head of population basis. At present we are not even keeping up with inflation on that basis and New Zealand should not be proud of that. That is what this Government has done. It has just got the wrong priorities in the health system. We have strategies frameworks guidelines and protocols to kingdom come but when it comes to actually delivering more services and more pharmaceutical assistance to New Zealanders the Minister stands up and says that we are doing more than Australia that it is cheaper here than in Australia and that it is a great thing for New Zealand. But he fails to say that per head of population our spending on pharmaceuticals has been falling for the last 4 or 5 years and that is nothing that this Government should be proud of. 
The National Party would like an opportunity for Parliament and the people of this country to debate the performance of Pharmac and the medicines policy. New Zealanders want the opportunity to come forward and tell their stories of how they have been affected by the system. They thought that United Future might give them this opportunity but we are now finding out that the Government’s medicines review is to be a closed-door Ministry of Health cook-up job. Ordinary people—the people who are at the frontline of dealing with this Government’s medicines policy—will not have the opportunity to come forward and express their frustration that we are not keeping up our pharmaceutical expenditure on a per head of population basis which would have been an easy ask for any Government that was determined to fix the issue.