van Velden Brooke; Salesa JennyBROOKE VAN VELDEN (Deputy Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Chair. I'd like to now turn to Supplementary Order Paper 152 in my name. It calls for the Minister to amend the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Bill to include a Medicines Strategy". My hope is that given ACT's success in our rural health strategy being amended that the Government will now move to adopt our medicines strategy.I hope that the Minister would seriously consider this because many people might not yet be aware but the Minister of Health today released the Pharmac inquiry's final report. This was an issue that the ACT Party campaigned on. We put forward saying that we needed to review Pharmac. It had been too long and there was a lack of transparency coming from Pharmac and its decision making and we really needed to look into whether Pharmac was still fit for purpose. Thankfully the ACT Party was able to get the Minister to agree that we also needed a review into Pharmac.But there is an element of this Pharmac review that I think needs to see the light of day and in this report it said that "The Ministry of Health is responsible for developing health-related policy for the Government. In our view the ministry needs to develop a replacement medicine strategy to guide the sector including Pharmac in its decision making." It goes on to say "We consider the absence of an up-to-date principles-based medicines strategy to be a crucial omission and one that will disrupt Pharmac's integration into the new health system. With health sector reforms not far away now is an ideal time to update the strategy to define medicines priorities. We consider the ministry should make updating the medicines strategy a priority."Well thankfully we have the ACT Party because we may be debating these particular clauses in the health reform today and the Minister may feel like it's too late to include a medicines strategy given that the final report has only been released today but I look right here at the ACT Party—No. 152—we've got one ready to go. It wouldn't take much for the Minister to adopt the medicines strategy that the ACT Party has already put forward into the legislation—just as the Pharmac inquiry believed we needed to have.Because I don't believe it is possible that we can reform the entire healthcare sector and not touch on medicines access at all. Hundreds of New Zealanders go without the medicines they need to live healthy productive lives—currently. We know that we need better access to new modern medicines and we need it faster. And throughout all of this talk about reforming the healthcare sector we've been talking a lot about administrative reform and we haven't been focusing on the outcomes. We know that medicines are changing. They're changing all the time. New medicines are turning up. Over the last decade we have invested the least into modern medicines in the OECD. We have fewer new modern medicines in the last decade than the rest of the OECD. I think we need to have a medicines strategy that actually plans out for the next coming years what we want New Zealanders access to modern medicines to look like.I think having a medicines strategy within the Ministry of Health that actually contains an assessment of the current state of medicines; the performance of the health sector to do with acquisition and provision of medicines; what the medium trends are what the long-term trends are for medicines access and health sector performance; and setting out some priorities for improving access to medicines would go some way to making sure that New Zealanders can live healthier more productive lives. I think it's a shame that it was missed out of this health reform in the first place. But it wouldn't take much for the Minister in the same way that he's adopted our rural health strategy to also adopt our medicines strategy because I think that's the right thing to do for all New Zealanders and their healthcare.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Before I take the next call I would like to warn members that the debate on this part Part 1 and Schedule 1 is getting repetitive."