Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): It is $1.7 billion. That is essentially the fiscal cut that this National Government has made in the health services. More importantly what we see—very sadly actually—is that this cut hurts our people. The kinds of people who are feeling the full effect of this cut are the people who are the most vulnerable: those who are trying to access our mental health services.The number of people who are accessing or trying to access mental health services has increased by 60 percent—60 percent—since 2008. It is just unacceptable that while there has been an increase a huge increase in those who are trying to access mental health services at the same time we are seeing funding cuts. What is also unacceptable is what we saw earlier on today: the response of the Minister of Health the Hon Jonathan Coleman saying of the folks who actually came and presented the People's Mental Health Report to Parliament yesterday: they're very left-wing anti-Government protestors."The folks who compiled this report regardless of the party affiliation that they have are 500 people who actually sent in how they experienced mental health services. Of that 500 93 percent of them told us of problems and challenges they are experiencing when they try to access mental health services. Only 7 percent of them actually spoke about positive experiences that they are currently having with our mental health services.We are all here as members of Parliament—121 of us. Many of us were voted in by people from our electorates and some of us were voted in because our parties were voted in because of the party vote. In this role we should listen when people actually tell us that they are hurting. When over 500 people are telling us that the mental health services in New Zealand are not working for them we should listen. We also had an addition to those 500 people: 12800 who signed a petition. They signed it because they are calling for better services. They are demanding better public mental health services.The full recommendations made by the People's Mental Health Report—and I must say Labour supports many of them. The first that we support is the fact that we should restore the Mental Health Commission. This Mental Health Commission we think should never have been got rid of. The second thing that we support—one of the recommendations here—is that we should have a national education programme. We think that once we restore the Mental Health Commission this is one of the things that the Mental Health Commission should look at. The report also calls for an inquiry into mental health services so that we identify what and where the most need is for funding and we support that we should look into an inquiry about this. The last recommendation from the People's Mental Health Report which we also applaud is the fact that it is calling for an increase in funding for mental health services.In February of last year there was a call for a cut of $140 million from mental health services. After that call was made several people actually came to Parliament and we believe that because of that the Government backtracked and gave back $20 million especially to Canterbury.A few weeks ago I had meetings with teachers and several of these teachers were from Canterbury. They were telling me that as teachers now of 7- and 8-year-olds they are getting young 7- and 8-year-old kids who are still traumatised by the earthquakes. They were questioning why it is that it is so hard for them as teachers to refer these children on to mental health services.We have a responsibility to ensure that we are adequately serving all of our people—our children in Canterbury as well as mental health service folks who are just trying to access services. When parents tell us that it is only when they say their teenagers are about to commit suicide that they can access services there is something essentially wrong with that. They should not have to say that they are suicidal before they can access services. Thank you."