Hodgson Pete: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
Hodgson Pete: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
[Volume:640;Page:10177] 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Minister of Health) 
: 
 I am not sure whether the House has realised that which is obvious to me and to anyone on this side of the House which is that the National Party cannot stand success. It cannot stand it when this Government continues to make progress. It continues to frustrate that progress and continues to opine that progress will not be made. It continues to hold the view that things will not come to fruition: that we will not be able to make progress on 20 free hours that KiwiSaver will not work that the roll-out of the Primary Health Care Strategy will not work and so on. National members are desperate for this Government to not make progress and the reason is that they have decided they want to go into the next election with one policy: no change from what is going on now but to do things with more style. That will be National’s policy approach: no change but they will do things with more style and maybe they will have some tax cuts. 
You see the problem National members have got themselves into is that this Government does not lack ambition. We are keen to improve the lot of New Zealanders in this that and the other sphere. In the short term in the medium term and in the long term we have a plan one might say. That plan is rolling out inexorably and the National Party if it is to have no change must embrace every part of the plan as it comes to fruition. Otherwise it will have to say it will roll it back. So if we look at our policies we see that the Primary Health Care Strategy is a cracker. If we look at National’s policies we see that its members went into the last election saying they would not have any more of the Primary Health Care Strategy roll-out. They said they would keep it for the under-25s and verily they would keep it for the over-65s—that part of the policy having already been rolled out—but oh no they were not going to roll out any more. Well National lost the election and the roll-out continues. So National will do a U-turn and say it did not mean that. It will say it will keep the Primary Health Care Strategy in its totality with not one bit of change but will do it with more style and there will be tax cuts. 
One can see that that approach is what National members are hoping for throughout all of the policy areas. They are desperate for the 20 free hours’ early childhood education policy to not work. They are talking it down as fast as they can because they know that when it does work they will have to embrace it. If they do not embrace the policy then a whole lot of people will say it was good and ask why National would want to take it away. So you see National members are on a rolling U-turn and they will stay on that rolling U-turn unless or until they finally one year a long time from now get themselves on to the Treasury benches. 
This Government does not lack ambition. We intend to roll out KiwiSaver and people will join it. Members can mark my words: people will join KiwiSaver. And what is more KiwiSaver will change the macroeconomic settings in this country significantly. It will over time improve our savings record. It will over time address the current account. It will over time mean that we will start to own more and more of our own country. And National will not be able to roll it back. 
That is also the case with regard to another change that is coming next Sunday: the 20 free hours’ early childhood education. That will be taken up and those who have been grizzling about it will join it. Some of them will not join immediately; they will want to hang out for a while and see what the market does. Well I can tell those people that they will end up with a niche position in the market if they want to keep charging a lot of money or they will change. When they change the National Party will change too. 
And so it is in the health system and so it is with regard to anything else that is going well in this country: the National Party is determined that it is not going well. So when we have the lowest unemployment rate in the world—except sometimes for that of South Korea—the National Party assures us that there are far more people on benefits than there ever were before even though we know that the numbers of people on the domestic purposes benefit the unemployment benefit the sickness benefit and most recently the invalids benefit are plummeting. The numbers are coming down. When we look at youth unemployment where the unemployment number has nearly hit the bottom we see that the National Party asserts week after week that the number is very high. Soon the number will be so low that we really will know the names and addresses of New Zealanders aged 18 and 19 who are on the unemployment benefit—again; just like the situation that existed in the 1960s. But the National Party will have no truck with that; its members cannot stand that success. 
National members cannot stand Working for Families being a good success. They cannot tolerate the notion that 130000 New Zealand children have been lifted out of poverty in recent years—they cannot stand it; they just do not like it. They say that they will take away bits of Working for Families and that as soon as Bill English and John Key can agree on which bits they will have a bit of policy. But so far they have not done so. Instead National members say that everyone is being made into a State beneficiary. Well Working for Families is optional. People can join it if they want to but National says we are making everybody a State beneficiary. Some of those National Party members are themselves State beneficiaries who earn $122500 for doing not much work. I would have thought that those members needed to reflect on what is a reasonable allocation of wealth across this country. In particular they should look at the way that children are treated in most other Western nations because there they will find some equivalent of the New Zealand Working for Families package. But no National members do not like it. 
The National Party is facing a Labour Government that refuses to stop its very substantial incremental changes for the future of this country. In respect of economic development National has the same argument that it has in other areas. Here we decided that our economy needed to be thickened up that it was not OK to rely on commodities alone and that we needed to move beyond that situation. And so arrived the fashion industry the film industry and many many other things beside that courtesy of the work of New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. What does National want to do? It wants to throw out New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. It thinks it is corporate welfare. Well no Western nation in the world agrees with the New Zealand National Party but that is the position it holds and that is certainly the position it held in the 1990s. The position it had in the 1990s when it was in Government was that all of that stuff was corporate welfare and that it was not going to have anything of it. 
So you see the National Party is in trouble because the business community thinks that New Zealand Trade and Enterprise does a good thing. The business community agrees with this Government’s approach to economic development. The business community thinks that the change that occurred in 1999 is a good change not a bad change. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: Tell us where you’ve read that. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: The proof comes in the votes right left and centre. Whenever we try to introduce New Zealand Trade and Enterprise legislation National votes against it. When we tried to involve National by seeing whether we could get its support for Industry New Zealand legislation it voted against it. When it came to changing the law in order to provide a tax break for research and development only a few weeks ago National voted against it. You see National votes against things then claims to be in favour of them. There is a word for that. It begins with “h”. One is not allowed to use that word— 
Darren Hughes 
: And you shouldn’t. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: And I shall not. 
To talk about another “h” word health I point out that what National does in respect of health is to ask where the extra $4 billion a year has gone and to say that it must have gone into bureaucrats. Well I will make a couple of points about that. First of all had there been a National Government for the past 7½ years—God help us all—there would not be an extra $4 billion spent in health. Instead there would be part charges in hospitals big fees to go to the doctor big fees to get drugs and waiting lists from here to Africa because that is what we inherited when we became the Government. So under National there would not be an extra $4 billion spend in health. 
Second if members want to know where that money has gone let me tell them. There are 28 hospital rebuilding projects under this Government. How many might there have been under National? There are 1200 more doctors in this country since the change of Government. How many more might there have been under National? There are 4000 extra nurses in our health system under this Government—4000 extra nurses! How many more might there have been under National? Doctors’ fees as I mentioned are cheaper. Rest homes are cheaper. Those members do not even want money to go towards paying for people to work in rest homes or for people to be paid extra to have their wages shifted from $11.50 to $13.50 for home-based support services. What do they call that? They call that unionist. I call it stabilising the workforce. 
National members are against expenditure on health in whatever form it comes. They do not want the before-school check. They do not want the newborn hearing screenings. They did not care about meningococcal meningitis—if they did care about meningococcal meningitis they would have introduced the vaccine when they were in Government. They do not care about pneumoccocal meningitis. They do not want more money to go into mental health. We have the best emergency department system amongst five nations and at question time today we saw Mr Ryall try to pull it to bits. What does that do for the people who work strange hours of the day or night dealing with people who are acutely unwell? What does that do for them? We have the best system it is getting better and he rips it to bits. That is the sort of leadership we see from the National Party.