Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. In my split call I would like to focus on the record investments in health but before I do I'd just like to provide a bit of context. During the lockdown I was lucky enough to sit on the Epidemic Response Committee and we heard from a whole range of health professionals who were themselves working during the lockdown. We heard from GPs and a number of GPs had moved incredibly quickly to providing remote consultations and focusing on providing the care that their patients needed while keeping both their patients and their staff safe. We heard from midwives who had been out in the community providing antenatal care—sometimes remotely sometimes face to face—and also delivering babies in difficult circumstances. We also heard from pharmacists who had been going out and making sure that patients had the prescriptions they needed by delivering them to people's homes.We also heard from some of the cancer services and particularly from specialist Chris Jackson. What he was talking about was how they had continued to deliver cancer care right through the lockdown—so chemotherapy radiotherapy and cancer surgery—and most of the patients that they were looking after had received the care that they needed right through that period. For him one of the quotes he was saying during that time he said The lockdown has kept people with cancer and vulnerable immune systems safe. They have been spared the serious or fatal harms of infection. This … to date [has] been a success." I think what he was saying basically was that this lockdown has made sure that those with cancer were completely protected from the effects of COVID in the community along with many many of us as well. So the success of that lockdown was noted by many. But what he was also talking about was the fact that the lockdown had resulted in delays in some cancer screening and delays in diagnostic tests and what he was saying was that as a sector we would need to be planning some catch up in the system for elective procedures and also for non-cancer elective procedures.This is where Budget 2020 also comes in. But this Budget isn't actually in isolation; this is the third of the Budgets from this Government and the previous two basically were designed to rebuild our health system after nine long years of neglect. Many of the things that were invested in those two previous Budgets are going to be incredibly relevant to our recovery including our record investments in mental health services and making sure that people on low incomes can continue to access low-cost GP visits. It's also incredibly important that we've invested over the last two Budgets in our DHBs and also in our crumbling hospital infrastructure our buildings that had been neglected over those nine years. So that's put us in a good position moving forward.But basically Budget 2020 isn't the only other significant investment that we've put in during this year because as the conditions started to deteriorate overseas our Ministry of Health our Government was watching. Basically because we had the capacity to put those border measures in place early we had the time to look at the evidence and put extra measures in place because in the absence of a vaccine contact tracing and early diagnosis are going to be the cornerstones of protecting us. So even before we announced Budget 2020 the Government on 17 March had announced $500 million in extra funding. What that funding was used for was to double the resourcing going into public health units who were at the coalface of that contact tracing setting up a national close-contact service that then coordinated that contact tracing and also looked at investigating the clusters and all those complex investigations.We also put extra money into primary care—not only just for primary care to look at telemedicine and remote consultations but also set up those community-based assessment centres so people knew where they could go and get a diagnostic test. We put extra money into Healthline so people could ring up and there would be extra doctors and nurses there to provide consultations. So there was a lot that we did even before we went into Budget 2020 and what that's done is as we've moved through and had an incredibly successful public health response—and the number of cases are very very small and we're getting many days now where we've got zero new cases—we're putting ourselves in a position for recovery.So where Budget 2020 comes in is now significant investment into our DHBs and so what we're basically doing is putting the largest investment into DHBs—$3.92 billion over the next four years or $980 million per year into DHBs—so they can do some of that catch up but also just to put them on a sustainable footing. We're also putting an extra $282 million over three years into a catch-up campaign for electives. So this is a good Budget for the health system and this is a good Budget for the people of New Zealand. Thank you Mr Speaker."