Curran Clare: New Zealand Public Health and Disability (Southern DHB) Elections Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: New Zealand Public Health and Disability (Southern DHB) Elections Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 12 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:11087. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I think that all of the people listening to Parliament this afternoon particularly if they come from Otago and Southland certainly do not believe—and they will feel insulted to have heard the member who just spoke Simon O’Connor get up and say that the local MPs who are sticking up for them and for their regions are spouting hollow rhetoric. That is our job and that is what we are elected to do and I would remind any of the MPs from Otago and Southland that what they are elected to do is to stick up for their constituents and to stick up for making sure they have got a proper and adequate health service in our region. That is what they should be doing instead of getting up and spouting out-of-touch and hollow rhetoric of their own across on that side.We in Labour have reasons for supporting this bill and I will repeat that it does gall me to support it because it is a bill that removes democracy from our district health board elections for a period of time and that is a really difficult thing to support. But we have a serious situation for our health services in the southern area and it has to be addressed—and that is why we are supporting the bill—because of the pressure that followed the amalgamation of the two district health boards and the lack of work that went in at that time under this Government to establish what the financial implications of that were; the ongoing deficit issues it has had which have been unable to be fixed and instead have got worse; and the appointment of a Crown monitor. For almost the entire period that this National Government has been in power there has been a Crown monitor on that board and it has not been able to fix it. These problems have got worse.The issues led to a lack of confidence by the people in Otago and Southland in the district health board and then led to the Minister of Health’s lack of confidence in the district health board. Ultimately the call and the issues lay with the Minister. He did take action finally after being urged to do so by Annette King our spokesperson. We have to support this bill much as it galls us to do so because if the commissioners who have been put in there are to do their job then they have to be given the time to do their job. The Minister ultimately is accountable and becomes much more visibly accountable. That is what this bill does.However along with that goes a set of responsibilities and accountabilities to the Minister and those commissioners that there has to be a plan that the community can accept the plan and then that the plan is implemented. That has to be done within the time period that has been set down for this bill which is 2019 for the next round of elections. One of our concerns is that it may get pushed out again and we cannot support that because the only reason we are supporting this bill is that it does set a time limit.We utterly understand the concerns that some in the community have about the loss of democracy. The Labour Party fought very strongly to have democratic elections return to Environment Canterbury. In previous parliaments when Labour was in power when a district health board has been dismissed and a commissioner appointed we have reinstated democracy as soon as possible. That is why Annette King put up an amendment during the Committee stage to try to ensure that democracy could be returned as quickly as possible by trying to insert the word “postpone” rather than “cancel the election” so there could potentially be democracy restored by 2019 because it may be that that is the case. Unfortunately that did not get the support of the Government.We are supporting this bill but that is where it ends. We need a plan in the Southern District Health Board region and we need that plan to be expressed. At the moment as my colleague David Clark said we have something that looks like a Christmas card—really just a bunch of platitudes—and we need a financial plan. We need a plan for the new build of the hospital and the clinical services building. We need to know what the management structure is going to be. We need to know the situation for the tertiary-level status of our district health board as a teaching hospital. We need a commitment to increased reporting and we need that to be publicly increased reporting—and that needs to be real reporting and not just platitudes. We need time lines and we need them now because right now we are not getting them. We are getting very vague statements. We are getting things told to us that are then getting pushed out. I have been told recently by the commissioner Kathy Grant that the business case for the new build of the clinical services building is now not due until mid - next year. Well earlier this year it was going to be the end of this year so now it has been pushed out another 6 months.Todd Barclay: These things take time Clare. These things take time.CLARE CURRAN: Well what does that tell us about what lies ahead? So there are concerns.The MPs on this side of the House who represent their electorates well and represent our region will be speaking out. We will be making demands. I read the member Todd Barclay’s speech in the Committee stage and there were two things in particular that he said that really concerned me. He said that this was “a long-term piece of work with a long-term goal”. That rings warning bells for me because that is sort of like acknowledging that it might take longer than until 2019 that we will need commissioners. On this side of the House we will not be supporting that. The other thing that concerned me was Mr Barclay’s insistence—ill-informed insistence because clearly he does not speak to many of his constituents in his work—that the Southern District Health Board is not underfunded. He himself admits that a district health board that services 290000 people across an area the size of Belgium is a very difficult thing to do and the population-based funding model is not fit for purpose in our region. When is he going to acknowledge that? And when are the other National Party MPs who represent our region—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am just going to ring the bell but I am going to ask the member for the last 2 minutes to come back to the bill.CLARE CURRAN: The bill is about removing democracy from our region and giving the commissioners a job to do in a limited period of time that requires a plan. Part of the issue is a financial sustainability plan. And if the commissioners cannot acknowledge and the National Party MPs cannot acknowledge that one of the core issues that underpins the situation that our district health board is in is that the population-based funding formula is not fit for purpose for our region then we cannot have a financially sustainable plan that will actually get us out of this hole. And what we need through this process is for that acknowledgment to be taking place.I do want to express some concerns about the tasks that lie ahead. The commissioners have had almost 1 year. They have got 3 years more. They are being vague. They have spent $240000 on a listening plan. Well they need to start taking some actions and putting some plans out there for the community to see. We need to see that they can manage contracts appropriately such as the contract with Compass Group which is providing the hospital food that is so controversial in our region where there are so many question marks about how that contract was drawn out; where there are still no key performance indicators even though that contract is now in place; and where we have questions about the level of governance around the management of that contract. There are so many questions. We have to keep monitoring the situation.