Verrall Ayesha; Mallard TrevorHon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Associate Minister of Health): Talofa lava. It is a privilege to speak in this my first Budget debate as an MP and a Minister. This Budget lays the foundations for coming out of COVID stronger and focuses on securing our recovery. This Budget builds on the strong position New Zealand is in thanks to our world-leading health response to the global pandemic. It means we can tackle long-term challenges like housing inequality and climate change. We can take a balanced approach that will create jobs and keep a lid on debt and we can invest in our infrastructure lifting children out of poverty and building a stronger more responsive health system.I do want to take a couple of minutes to highlight some new initiatives that will make a real difference to people. And let's start with COVID. In this Budget we'll see that public health units will receive a $53.2 million investment. That is building on $40 million for public health units in the last Budget. Not many people know the day-to-day work of public health units but they are the people who respond to all our COVID outbreaks who do school testing who coordinate public health responses to every outbreak who do the contact tracing and who often coordinate COVID-related activities across the DHB. In addition to this they are also promoting health in their communities through things such as smoking prevention or improving food environments. As part of this investment there will be $15.4 million to train 10 additional public health specialists each year. This plus the Government's plans to develop a public health agency as part of our wider systems reforms means that the future of public health in New Zealand post-pandemic is in good heart. We will never need to rebuild our public health infrastructure in the face of a pandemic again.Other initiatives that are related to preventative health include the HPV testing and breast-screening announcements. Budget 2021 will deliver a better cervical-screening test and a major upgrade to breast screening that will save lives. We're investing $53 million to implement a new human papillomavirus test which is the cause of the majority of cervical cancers. As my colleague Sarah Pallett has mentioned the new test will replace the current smear test and it will mean that for 1.4 million eligible women they will soon have a simple and quick swab rather than an invasive speculum exam. We know from clinical trials conducted in New Zealand that this will increase the number of Māori and Pacific women who are willing to participate in the screening programme. These are groups that we have traditionally underserved. Our modelling predicts that we'll detect an additional 400 cancers over 17 years and save over 138 lives. Around a third of those will be lives of Māori.In breast screening we are also investing in new technology. We're building a better register that guides the information technology for our breast screening. As has been mentioned the opt-in model is currently a barrier to women accessing breast screening and through the new register we'll be able to reach the 271000 women proactively who currently are not on the screening programme.In the final moments I want to draw attention to some of the other health and vaccine investments particularly those that are of interest to seniors. One of the biggest investments—I think it's underappreciated how important it is—is the $1.4 billion we've invested in the COVID vaccination programme to ensure that a New Zealander can receive a free vaccination. Yes it's a massive investment but it is also an investment that is most likely to save the lives of seniors in New Zealand and I think that will be one of the biggest impacts that we'll have on the health of seniors in history. These investments sit alongside other major investments in health including $200 million for Pharmac so that New Zealanders can access more medicine and $100 million for ambulance services.Finally we have also put aside money in the Budget for an Aged Care Commissioner which we'll be able to provide more details on in the future. There is much more in Budget '21 that I could talk about from the investments in warmer healthier homes to the major increases in weekly benefit rates. This is a Budget for recovery and that looks out for people in need and tackles our long-term challenges.SPEAKER: As I call Erica Stanford I want to indicate to her that she has less than five minutes because when there's 10 minutes to go in the debate I will call the Minister of Finance in reply—about four minutes.