Fox Marama: Urgent Debates — Health Ministry—Financial Management of Building ProjectText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFox Marama: Urgent Debates — Health Ministry—Financial Management of Building Project[Sitting date: 08 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9445. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MARAMA FOX (Co-Leader—Māori Party): I want to recognise the Speaker of the House who after receiving the letter from the Leader of the Opposition thought it important enough that we follow that letter and have an urgent debate. There is an issue here. The issue of overspending ensures we could say that we do not get to spend in the areas of most need. The rates for Māori in health in all of the outcomes are poorly represented. We could go on to ask: should the ministry have put money into bricks and mortar or put the money into the asthma rates for children for Māori? The chronic obstructive pulmonary disease rates for Māori women are the worst in the world. We can carry on having that debate for ever. There are a lot of things that the Ministry of Health could have spent that money on notwithstanding the ministry needs a building to go into. So that is beside the point. The point of this is that the ministry did not have the money that it said it had.We have heard from Annette King who explained the details of that. I thought it was serious enough and the Speaker of the House thought it was serious enough that we should address the issue. I waited to hear the explanation but I did not hear it. It was not forthcoming. And so I do go back to those statistics because for me they are quite concerning. We are overrepresented in too many areas as Māori in this country as Pasifika in this country and that needs to be addressed. Just this year I was approached by an asthma group—the Train the Trainer workers for Māori asthma providers in this country—that had had its contract ended for no apparent reason. No reason was given to it; it had met all of the outcomes that had been asked of it by the Ministry of Health.Māori have some of the highest rates of asthma in this country and in the world and yet the only Māori health provider that provided training for trainers for asthma prevention had its contract discontinued. Hauora groups across the country have expressed concern that funding for Māori health is continuing to dwindle. I have put those questions to the Minister of Health and to the Ministry of Health and have not yet been satisfied with the answers that have been provided. Māori adults are three times as likely as non-Māori adults to smoke.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am slightly reluctant to interrupt the member but I did listen carefully to the rulings that the Speaker previously in the Chair Chester Borrows gave as to the narrowness of this debate and the importance of relating matters to it. It is not a general health debate and it is not a health estimates debate; it is on a relatively narrow issue. The flow-on from that may be something that the member could discuss but she has got to at least occasionally get back to the issue.MARAMA FOX: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I listened intently to a number of the issues that were raised in the House and I felt that they were quite wide and therefore gave me some leniency here but I take your direction. And the point comes back to the fact that $24 million has been overspent misspent and not calculated for correctly and has been presented some might say fraudulently to the Health Committee. And yet we continue to have these disparities. It is a borderline issue but I am waiting to hear the response.I am waiting to hear how that mistake happened and then did not get reported back. I am waiting to hear from our Minister how we can continue to address these issues of disparities and not have those mistakes happen again. I have not been satisfied that I have heard those things. I have heard from the Associate Minister of Health Peter Dunne that the spending on health has gone up that we cannot make those comparisons that this may not have made much difference and that we have fewer workers overall in the bureaucracy of the health sector. Yet we continue to have this mistake raised in front of us and we continue to have the disparity of health statistics for our people.I do push the boundary of this discussion to mention that because the reasons that have been given by the Minister and the Associate Minister for expanding health spending to address those issues are clearly not evident when you look at the statistics for Māori health and for Pasifika health in this country. And so I appreciate the leniency that the Assistant Speaker has given me today. I would be interested to hear that these issues are being addressed. I would be interested to see next year—again when it gets that far—that they come to the select committee and present their findings to show that processes have been put in place to eliminate this happening again. Thank you.