O'Connor Simon: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Simon: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 31 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11499. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Love is in the air.Hon Member: Oh!SIMON O’CONNOR: I know. Love is in the air. What an announcement today. As most in the House know I am actually getting married at the end of the year. I am quite excited about that but I understand there is another union. Another union has been announced in Parliament today a union that is meant to provide a contrast to the Budget that we are discussing today. Labour and the Greens are jumping into bed together. As I try to imagine that union in flagrante I am struggling a bit. In some ways I apologise for introducing it to the House. Look I do not remember Labour and the Greens fighting but they said they have been and now they have started to work together. I guess now they can put aside their loopy differences and can focus on the loopy things that they have in common. I for one am welcoming the Green-Labour nuptials. I wish them a long happy marriage full of new taxes legalised drugs criminalised sugar and the abolition of every industry in New Zealand.In a very practical sense it is not actually clear what either party is going to get from this deal which is a great contrast in terms of the Budget where I think New Zealanders are very clear what they are getting from that. With these nuptials the Greens have been promised nothing. Maybe Green Party members are happy with that. Maybe they really did negotiate a deal for themselves to help Labour in return for nothing and look that could be true. They did get left at the altar by Helen Clark in 2005 but you know they could fall for that again. As I have been told love is blind. But there is more to come out of it. Maybe we have to hear more about this. Already there are ructions of noise from the other side—not a good sign in these early stages of going steady. But really to the Labour side what are they going to see from this? Cabinet posts? Surely Andrew Little would not be selling his Labour colleagues down the river just for a shot at the PM’s office.The real question is: what do the Greens get out of this deal? Is my colleague who just spoke Steffan Browning going to become the new Minister for Primary Industries? And really is Catherine Delahunty at the expense of my Labour colleagues going to become the Minister of Foreign Affairs? We have heard today directly from the Leader of the Opposition’s mouth that this will not be a monogamous relationship. He admits that the Greens are going to get screwed again. Labour and the Greens indeed are going to take us back to 2005. But I do hope that Labour and the Greens—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Take care.SIMON O’CONNOR: —have signed a prenuptial agreement because I think it is going to be a very messy divorce and that ultimately is a huge contrast to what we have seen and heard in a Budget speech last week from a Government that is unified and that is focused and is heading down the right path bringing along if you will the people of New Zealand strongly wedded—to continue the puns—to a Government in the polls because it is delivering.In my own area—I just want to turn to Tāmaki—I think there is an enormous amount of good news there. Obviously there is a whole lot of stuff in health and depending on time I will get to it but we have heard about more funding in housing and we need only turn our minds to the likes of the Tāmaki redevelopment project. I think it is an incredibly good project. I am not going to pull a colleague from the other side of the House into it just in case he gets into trouble but it is actually a really good initiative. It is one that has actually been developed over successive Governments but is bearing fruit under this present Government: 2500 houses are going to be turned into 7500 clean dry insulated warm homes. Just going around Glen Innes in particular at the moment what a transformation is already occurring as those new houses are popping up. For those of us who have been up around Sunhill recently—a really good example of infrastructure spending that this Government is leading—one only needs to think of the cycleway that is going from Glen Innes through to Tāmaki Drive. Stage one is almost completed.We have heard from the education side of things that there is more money being pumped into education. This too has been manifest in Tāmaki in my own electorate when we think of the classrooms that were announced particularly last year. But we now know that there is more money coming not just of course for the likes of Tāmaki;it is actually for classrooms and infrastructure across the country. But I for one am hopeful that there is support in this Budget for more assistance in my electorate particularly in education. When I go around talking to the various principals and teachers it is very clear first and foremost that not only are they doing a fantastic job but also we have growing rolls. In fact in my electorate and ward intensification is already happening. By ward the most housing consents across Auckland I believe are actually happening in the Tāmaki or the Orākei ward. So why that impacts on education is actually because the families are moving in young families in particular. There is that growing pressure on our schools so I think it is tremendous to have seen in this Budget that more money is on the way.When we talk of infrastructure it would be remiss of me to not talk about the ultra-fast broadband. Again if you are travelling down most of the streets of Tāmaki at the moment they have turned a little bit orange as there are more orange cones than I care to count and primarily this is for the ultra-fast broadband that is going in. For whatever reason it has not quite reached my house in St Heliers yet—I am not sure whether I am to take that personally or not—but it is coming I am told. And particularly to Ethan who might be watching at home I am told it is coming up the road very soon Ethan. We will get up to a much higher broadband speed both download and upload.The other things that I quickly want to touch on because I am conscious of time are in the health space. I do this first and foremost as a New Zealander; secondly as a member of Parliament of course and as chair of the Health Committee. There is $2.2 billion of new spend into the health care sector in this Budget and that is building again on a very strong—if I can continue from a bit earlier—relationship that the Government has had with the health sector and I think fundamentally from understanding the health sector. I know colleagues of mine particularly on the National Party side of the Health Committee are out and about engaging with the communities—my colleague Barbara Kuriger is nodding her head. In fact we just had people from the Rural Health Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand come and talk to us recently. So more money is being made available to district health boards and the like which is fundamentally important. More money is going into elective surgeries.As a number of people are pointing out there is more money going into the pharmaceutical budget which I think is immensely important. I think it is useful for the House to note that the extra funding that has been announced obviously is for the likes of drugs for metastatic cancer in the melanoma space. We have heard about the remarkable drug in the hepatitis C market that does not manage hepatitis C but actually cures it but there are five other drugs as well that are being looked at. So again there is a remarkable opportunity there. This is a very strong spend and I think one that will continue to have to be looked at by Government. Those who have any interest in the health space will understand that these new biologics or immunotherapies are quite remarkable drugs. In fact just thinking quickly and briefly some of the drugs that have been put forward for the skin cancer of melanoma can also be used for the likes of lung cancer. I was very pleased to be talking to some people from the Lung Foundation recently about that. The whole pharmaceutical increase and the whole pharmaceutical spend is a perfectly good example of a Government that is listening and doing its best to not only respond to a growing economy but also be prudent around the spend and understand that there are limits.The other area—and it is to do with health but it also reaches out into our academic space—is the almost $100 million that was announced by Ministers Coleman and Joyce around health research funding. I think that that is incredibly important as well. I am very fortunate to have several trustees from the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research in my electorate along with professors doctors and academics from the University of Auckland who are often chewing my ear on these matters. It is amazing what they are developing be it at the institute or at the university. But more money provides more opportunity not only to discover these drugs but also to do so in New Zealand which I believe has flow-on opportunities.Finally I just want to quickly touch on the question of homelessness. It has been popping up a little bit here in conversations. I do so primarily as someone who has actually worked with the homeless many many years ago. In fact if I could link it to health I remember clearing out some of the clothes that the homeless had left behind and in doing so I found a nice used needle stuck in my thumb—one of those sorts of experiences you do not want to repeat. Why I mention it is that homelessness is something that has been around for a long time under successive Governments. Some of the discussions here today seem to suggest that it is completely new; it is not. But this Government is continuing to address it and I very much commend this Budget to the House.