Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. This is a Budget to be proud of and it's going to make a huge difference to many many people's lives. I just want to think back to the inquiry into mental health and addiction. The panel travelled through the country last year and they heard many many stories from many people. They heard from people that were grappling with their own mental health and addiction challenges they heard from families bereaved by suicide and they also heard from workers in our mental health system working with really really stretched conditions and also those in our community trying to hold things together. What they heard was that our current system is just not working and that people are not getting the services that they need. They heard about young people falling through the gaps and even with people when they got services they actually didn't meet their needs. So this is why this Budget is making mental health a top priority and we're investing $1.9 billion in a mental health package so that we can get on and start implementing many of those recommendations that the inquiry put forward that we should be doing. One of the key planks to this is looking at these new front-line services that we're putting into doctors clinics and also many other health services in our community. What that will mean is that those with mild to moderate needs particularly can turn up to their GP and get put in touch with a key mental health worker. What that mental health worker will do is navigate that often difficult pathway to accessing the services they need. For some of those people it may just be a few sessions with that mental health worker and to be able to develop some strategies and think through where they can go. But for others they might need long-term support or even referral to specialist services. So what that person will do—the mental health support worker—will be walk alongside them on their journey and that's going to be really really important.What we've got is those challenges with the current workforce capacity and so what will happen is these services will be rolled out over five years. But the Budget puts aside significant investment so that we can train that workforce and also make sure we've got the facilities that we need so that those services can be rolled out.One of the other things that the package does is it puts significant investments into suicide prevention and certainly this is an area of significant unmet need in my own community and around the country. The Ministry of Health is working on a suicide prevention strategy but what Budget 2019 does is it puts an extra $40 million over four years into suicide prevention services so that those at most risk can actually access the support they need.The other things we are looking at investing in are extra resource into telephone counselling and also internet-based supports so that people have got the flexibility of accessing services and support how they need them. For many people this may mean that they can actually get that support without even leaving home which is really important.The other thing for young people in particular is what we're doing is extending nurses in schools. Currently it's in up to decile 1 to 4 high schools but what we're doing is extending it up to decile 5 high schools and that means an extra 5600 students have got access to a health professional in their school that they can go and talk to and that can serve as an entry point if they need it into other services for them which is really critically important.So there are a lot of things that we're doing in addressing unmet need in mental health and we really really need to do that but one of the other areas of significant investment in health is in our ageing health infrastructure—our hospitals our facilities—where we've had almost a decade of neglect and we've got you know the legacy of their mouldy hospitals and rundown and earthquake-prone buildings and we haven't actually gone along and addressed them. So there's a lot of money put aside there—$1.7 billion over the next two years—to make significant investments in rebuilding and refurbishing our hospital buildings and that will make a huge difference to many people working in those facilities and to patients as they come in.So basically what this Budget does is it's starting to tackle some of those huge long-term challenges in our mental health services and our health infrastructure. But it also does a lot of other things. So we've got investments into rheumatic fever which is critically important for children in terms of the lifelong impact that can have. We've got rebuilding our classrooms and our schools. We've got other significant investments to address family violence. We're looking at making a lot of changes that will positively impact families reliant on benefits. So this is a significant milestone Budget and I'm proud to commend it to the House.