Kuriger Barbara: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKuriger Barbara: General Debate[Sitting date: 16 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6688. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]BARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): It is a pleasure to stand up here with 4 days to go until the anniversary of the election as Mr English said before. It has been a very very productive year for the National Government and I think that the biggest thing that I have come out of this year with with heart is that this is a Government that really has heart for provincial New Zealand. When I came in here one of the things that I wondered was how much of what goes on out there is really really well understood in Wellington and I have to say I am going back to my electorate the whole time and saying to people: “Actually this is a Government that does understand provincial New Zealand.”There are two things that I went into this year thinking I was just going to do a deeper dive with because they were things out there in the community that were concerning me. One of them was the area of family violence and the other one was rural mental health. Just recently under the National Government through Minister Amy Adams a consultation document has been launched and I have been really impressed with the process around this consultation document. What the Minister of Justice did is she actually sent us out to consult with some of our groups. I have been working very very closely with the Maniapoto Family Violence Intervention Network in Te Kūiti which is also doing some work in Ōtorohanga and it actually had its opportunity to provide feedback to the Minister in the process of putting this consultation document together.So from that the consultation document is now out. It was a real pleasure to go and sit with the network recently and say to its people “Here’s the document. You’ve had some input into preparing this document and now you can actually have some feedback and we will get this in the right place.” because my belief is that 80 to 90 percent of the good ideas actually come out of our communities; they do not come out of Wellington. I am really pleased that our National Government is listening to the communities.The other thing—on the mental health side—it is just so rewarding to see another half a million dollars going into rural mental health getting people trained up to go out there to understand to find people who are not feeling great and to try methods and ways of helping them. All the support services are out there; it is just that people do not stand up and ask to be helped. Often in those situations they feel a bit embarrassed or they feel that there is a stigma around that. So I am really pleased to see that there are troops on the ground now working on mental health. I am also very pleased to see in a year that has been a bit dark for the dairy industry that we have now had three auctions that have gone up. So there is just a shout-out for my industry.On the Health Committee which is one that I enjoy very much we work very collegially together. We have some well-documented gains under health. We now have free GP visits for children under 13 which is really appreciated by families in the community. We are delivering more elective surgeries and they have increased by an average of 4000 elective surgeries a year. I think this is really commendable from the Government. When this Government took over women were going to Australia to have their breast cancer treatments. So I think this is great.The other thing is that we are opening up legislation around nurse practitioners and that is a really good move. We are opening up the legislation so that nurse practitioners who have the training and education and skills to carry out certain tasks will now after the legislation goes through under the law be able to carry out those certain tasks. More money has also gone in to train more nurse practitioners because that is going to be a way to get more services out into our provincial communities. I have also had the pleasure of being on the Mobile Surgical Unit bus. It is a great bus. The Minister of Health has now committed to more funding for that going forward.So some of it is about people; some of it is also about our conservation projects. It is really great to see that we are doing some great work there in terms of the Battle for our Birds. Some of the rat and stoat numbers in some of our communities have dropped down very close to undetectable numbers in some areas where we have been working very hard on that one. So all in all I am very proud to be standing here and looking back on a first year where there has been a huge amount of work done. Thank you.