Hague Kevin: Crown Entities Reform Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: Crown Entities Reform Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 04 October 2011. Volume:676;Page:21676. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker Robertson. Tena koutou e te Whare. I will take what may be a brief call on behalf of the Green Party to say that we will oppose the Crown Entities Reform Bill and to set out some of our reasoning. This bill is one of those bills that is good in parts but overall we believe it is not worthy of support. 
I will touch on the elements of the bill that we like to begin with. The first element I want to acknowledge is the ending of the Crown Health Financing Agency. This agency has been extremely important to the health sector. It has been effectively the sector’s bank for some years now and I believe that Graeme Bell is deserving of considerable praise for the way he has carried out that work. Certainly it is an agency that was absolutely essential in times past but for the most part the role it has been performing is now over. We are able to move forward without that agency but we note the positive contribution it has made. 
The second aspect of the bill that I think is very positive on balance is the creation of a Health Promotion Agency. Again it is no slight at all on the various entities that are being rolled into this new agency because each of them has done some sterling work for New Zealand and New Zealanders over many years in some cases. What I hope will transpire should the bill be passed and this new agency created is that the new agency will build on the work carried out by those agencies rather than start from square one. 
One of the things that the new agency will have the potential to provide is a unified approach to health promotion. Health promotion I need to remind the House is all about keeping people well in the first place. There is a well-established formula for the actions that Governments need to take to be able to do that: the promotion of healthy public policy the creation of supportive environments the strengthening of community action the development of personal skills and the reorientation of health services. The most important of those from the point of view of the Government and the one where the Government is most directly able to change outcomes is that of developing and promoting healthy public policies. 
The new Health Promotion Agency will have greater clout and greater ability to be able to influence public policy although I note that that is one of the functions that is not explicitly set out in the bill. I hope it is one of the matters that is addressed during the consideration of the bill by the Government Administration Committee. 
I also want to draw attention to another function that is not clearly set out in the bill and that is the funding of health promotion activity and public health work. The bill transfers some functions of the Ministry of Health to the new agency but it is unclear about what will happen to the funding of public health. 
I urge the Government and the select committee to very strongly consider adding the funding of public health services into the functions of the new agency and I fear that the alternative may be for the ministry to devolve funding of public health services to district health boards. In my view and in the view of the Green Party that would be a grave error in that it would run some of the risks that have befallen mental health funding where funding intended for a particular purpose is in fact transferred over and used for another purpose. 
Perhaps I might move on to mental health funding now. One of the aspects that we oppose in the bill is the rolling of the Mental Health Commission into the Office of the Health and Disability Commissioner. We oppose that for a variety of reasons. One is that it will weaken the focus on mental health. 
Mental health has had an interesting journey in the health sector. It was very clearly a Cinderella service in the health sector—one that was underfunded and under-recognised by mainstream services—but through the work of the Mental Health Commission it has developed a greater prominence. Our awareness of mental health needs is much greater and mental health services have become much better. 
The development of the blueprint for mental health services was a very important landmark event in health services development in this country. Still however at this point when the Mental Health Commission is to be rolled into the Office of the Health and Disability Commissioner the Mental Health Commission has not completed its task. What we still see from district health boards is that money that is reserved—ring-fenced in fact—for mental health services is being used outside of the ring-fence and for other services. 
That is occurring at a time when all bar one I think of our 20 district health boards have not yet met their blueprint volumes for mental health services. In other words they are not yet providing all of the mental health services that the blueprint says they ought to be. So this is not the time to risk the Mental Health Commission’s mission by this kind of change and that is what the bill does. 
The Office of the Health and Disability Commissioner is another institution within the health sector that does a splendid job but it is a very different job from the one that the Mental Health Commission performs. Our fear from this party is that this change will undermine the work of the Mental Health Commission and we do not believe that is appropriate. 
The other significant change that is intended by this bill is to roll the Charities Commission into the Department of Internal Affairs. We believe that that would be a terrible mistake. We would be probably the first party in this House to have some criticisms of the way that the Charities Commission has gone about its work but nonetheless we believe that the institution of the Charities Commission is an important one and here is the reason. Charities—the community sector; that third sector—are explicitly not part of the State sector and part of the whole rationale for the development of a Charities Commission in the first place was to ensure that that third sector the community sector did not become hostage to ministerial whim. We said that the policing of that sector the regulation of that sector needed to be independent from ministerial intervention and ministerial control. By rolling the Charities Commission into the Department of Internal Affairs that separation is entirely lost. The door is again opened to political interference and to political decisions about that third sector and its own regulation. We believe that is inappropriate. 
So on balance the bill is a mixture of some things that have some promise and are actually very positive and some things that are the wrong way to go. On that basis we cannot support the bill. We hope that some changes will be made at the select committee to enable us to support the bill in its future stages and we are very happy to work with other parties to enable that to occur. Thank you.