Verrall AyeshaHon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Associate Minister of Health): It's a privilege as always to take a call in this House but no one should be more grateful for the Speaker's generosity than the Leader of the Opposition Mr Luxon who missed his call in the first debate of the year and then without a shred of irony got up and said National's ready." And we all saw how ready National is. We wanted to hear a debate speech but instead we got a TED Talk which characterised their COVID policy as "sensible upgrades". What does that mean? I won't repeat the litany of different positions the National Party has had on managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) that the Deputy Prime Minister outlined well but it's fair to say that the National Party have had more positions on MIQ than the Kama Sutra! And each change in their policy they don't need to worry about because it has no consequences. They're just trying to win one media cycle after the next while the Government has succeeded time and time again in keeping people alive.You can't undo the consequences of bad pandemic management—although Mr Bishop tried to suggest you could just change up your border policy when it seems to be politically inconvenient. During the Omicron outbreak our border policy has stopped a thousand further incursions and kept New Zealanders alive while they got boosted. And today Mr Luxon asked for a time line for an end to vaccine mandates—like you can schedule a pandemic like you can an aeroplane. And yet it is abundantly clear to any objective observer that the COVID response that New Zealand has launched has been one of the best in the world. And it probably kills the Opposition to acknowledge that. We have the lowest rate of deaths we have low case numbers we have had succeeded where other countries with stronger health systems have failed—where those with stronger scientific institutions have failed we have succeeded. And we have built effective systems where none existed. We built those systems in 2020 and 2021 and then adjusted them again for Omicron. We have kept New Zealanders safe through an MIQ system in which we have a staged and managed approach to allowing people to reconnect. We have developed a testing system that has had one of the lowest positivity rates in the world. We have doubled our PCR capacity. We have installed robotic methods to make sure that our workforce is supported from the stress of running the testing system. We have a contact tracing system that is currently keeping one of the most virulent and transmissible variants or infectious diseases at bay—incredibly effectively. We are deploying boosters at the time when they are most needed and also vaccinating the paediatric population. We have built and refined our systems and the Opposition have focused on the RATs and mice of winning each individual media cycle.It is worth remembering that this isn't the first pandemic that we have experienced in our lifetime. I was a doctor in the Wellington Hospital laboratory during the 2009 pandemic the H1N1 influenza pandemic. And what was the legacy of that pandemic response? What was it? Where were the quarantine facilities built after than pandemic response? Where were the contact tracing systems—the infection-control infrastructure that was strengthened? No we didn't have that. We did have a handful of pandemic personal protective equipment supplies some masks with the elastic that had perished. So there is an embarrassment of lack of investment in pandemic preparedness which this Government has not only countered but has built the most successful pandemic response in the world on the back of it. And what the pandemic response has shown us is that prevention is better than cure and that is how we have achieved some of the best health outcomes in the pandemic and enabled many of our economic freedoms to continue. It has been because we have addressed some of the long-term issues that have not been confronted and we will continue to do this this year through our wider work in strengthening public health in New Zealand.We will now enabled by legislation passed last year improve the oral health of New Zealanders by fluoridating more community water supplies—another health issue that has not been confronted for years. We will implement the now-regulated fortification of bread and flour with folate to prevent neural-tube defects. We will take a world-leading approach to preventing the most harmful consumer product in the world—tobacco—and make sure that future generations of New Zealanders grow up smoke-free. We will install the fundamental of public health which is access to clean water through the three waters reforms that Minister Mahuta so ably leads. We will build HPV and breast-screening infrastructure that'll keep women safe in their adulthood and we will do these things that National promised to do but never funded. We will stop women from falling through the cracks of the public health system and we will leverage the technology that we have built in the COVID response to make sure that our wider childhood immunisation system prevents diseases like influenza and measles. And that will be through technology like mobile apps that we've already used but also through the community mobilisation that has been a strength of our vaccine roll-out.These long-term issues in securing the health of New Zealanders have been in the too-hard basket for too long and I am looking forward to the work that we will do this year in order to secure those changes. But the pandemic has also shone a light on our health system and we have seen both the exceptional efforts of our highly trained staff and our ability to deploy science to bear on a critical problem in a rapid period of time. But we have also faced challenges. We saw in our vaccine roll-out that some DHBs were slower to roll out vaccinations than others. This is what we mean by the postcode lottery. There are many small and financially challenged DHBs that needed the greater support to complete their roll-out. It also revealed the inadequacy of some small DHBs' investments in their IT system and as a result we had to build multiple systems centrally. This Government is committed to reforming the health system for our day-to-day health so it can be improved but also in case we face future health challenges like the pandemic that we inevitably will. Critical to this is building a Māori Health Authority that will address the shameful health inequalities that have for far too long characterised healthcare in our country. At the heart of our reformed Ministry of Health will be a public health agency where the skills and knowledge built through this pandemic will be deployed to address preventable causes of disease in the future.One of the most important things we will do is build Health New Zealand and set its strategy through health plans. It will get DHBs off the cycle of single-year annual plans so that we can address long-term challenges. That includes in DHB infrastructure CAPEX but also the challenges of diseases that need to be addressed over the longer term such as diabetes. And we will find improved ways of working at the community using lessons that we have built through the vaccine roll-out and deployed at the level of localities. This Government has achieved the best health outcomes in the OECD through the global pandemic and we have kept our people safe. We have kept our freedoms we have kept people in work we have kept our exporters going and we will be bringing our people home safely—[Interruption]ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! With apologies to the member can I direct members to Speaker's ruling 140/2 and just remind members that interjections are to be rare and continue to be reasonable.Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL: Thank you Madam Speaker. I commend the PM's statement to the House and I am eager to continue the work."