Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): The member has cleared something up. They're not the tax demons; they're the excise demons because that's what they're calling it now. Apparently it matters to the Government. Well as Nikki Kaye said it certainly doesn't matter to the people of Auckland who have to pay 25c a litre more for their fuel—and wait it's coming to a region near everybody—because that's what the Government wants to change. But it's not tax; it's an excise.I want to start by stating that the issues at Middlemore Hospital are very concerning. But any doubt that the Government was manufacturing a crisis to cover the panic that they have over the promises was removed emphatically by the Prime Minister in question time today when in answer to a question about why she didn't use the very healthy surpluses left by the previous Government it was because apparently of Middlemore Hospital and Dunedin Hospital. Well here's the thing. We know about Dunedin Hospital because the previous Government committed unambiguously to a $1.4 billion rebuild. If it's a crisis it's a crisis entirely of the Government's making because they chose to put that money back into the Government's balance sheet by—and Mr Peters will be very interested in this—borrowing from overseas banks instead of using the very good equity interests that were coming from people like the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund iwi and others. ACC potentially could have invested in Dunedin Hospital as part of a public-private partnership. Their crisis is entirely of their own making because they decided that that was ideologically flawed. But the only quantum of the extra money that we've now heard—and I think it's highly exaggerated but even if it wasn't—is $200 million for Middlemore Hospital.Now they campaigned on adding $8 billion more into the health sector alone than a National Government would have over the next four years—$8 billion. They've got it in their fiscal responsibility statement. They know how they're going to spend it and apparently new revelations so far totalling $200 million are completely upsetting the applecart. I want to know actually what this extra $10 billion of capital spending is. So I asked the Minister who is a member of what they purport to be the most open and transparent Government in parliamentary history whether he will release the details of the advice given to him and the Minister of Finance and the answer was We'll consider it."—we'll consider it. Apparently there's a crisis they've got advice but they don't want to release the information.So I asked: give us one example—one example—of something that was unexpected and the answer was Nelson Hospital. Well newsflash for the Government: we knew about Nelson Hospital because we asked for the work to be done. There are serious seismic issues at Nelson Hospital and they need to be remedied—hardly unexpected hardly a crisis. That's what Governments do. They replace things they invest in things and they fix things—and we did. Waikato Hospital Wellington Regional Hospital Burwood Hospital and Christchurch Hospital were all rebuilt in the term of the previous Government as part of the multibillion-dollar investment in the asset stock that we made and the $5 billion extra—more than that actually—that we put in to Vote Health for operational spending.And what did we get out of it? Did we get the crisis that they've just manufactured? No we got 50000 more surgeries. We got no gurneys in the emergency departments. We got no cancer patients being flown to Australia. We got record levels of immunisation rates. We got 323000 homes insulated under Warm Up New Zealand. We got results and apparently that's a crisis.Well I suggest that it's a manufactured crisis and I'll stand very proudly on that record. The Government needs to understand that when one is managing a nearly $17 billion vote in health there will be issues like Middlemore Hospital. There will be things to deal with on a day-to-day basis but that is not an excuse to repudiate the promises that they made to the nurses to the midwives to the allied health professionals to the doctors but most of all to the patients that they would do something better. Because I can see what comes after a manufactured crisis. It's those other two words we're going to hear a lot of over the next few months: broken promises."