Hipkins Chris: Crown Entities Reform Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hipkins Chris: Crown Entities Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 23 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2339. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 I want to take a brief call to follow up on some of the comments that the Minister of State Services just made about State sector reform and how this bill the Crown Entities Reform Bill fits in with the Government’s wider agenda for State sector reform. I think this bill is quite different from a number of other aspects of the Government’s State sector reform agenda. First of all it does not involve putting Steven Joyce in charge of something else and I think that is quite rare. Most State sector reform under this Government generally tends to involve the Joyce empire growing while the other Ministers end up being underdeployed. This bill clearly does not do that. It puts some more functions under Tony Ryall’s little empire. Of course as we know from reading in the paper Tony Ryall does not play nicely with others. He likes to have everything under his control in his little box.  
The Labour Party does support sensible reform in the State sector. We support reforms in the State sector that make the State sector more responsive to the New Zealand public. We believe that the public sector can certainly be better and can certainly deliver services to the New Zealand public in a way that is more timely more efficient and more effective and we would like to see the public sector more focused on outcomes. We do not agree that in large part the Government’s agenda for State sector reform is achieving that. It is in fact doing quite the opposite in many areas. It is not leading to greater efficiency. In fact it is leading to greater inefficiency. The best example of that is the arbitrary cap on the number of people employed by the Public Service. What we are seeing is that that is resulting in a massive increase in spending on consultants and contractors. But that is an issue for another day rather than for the debate on this particular bill.  
I do just want to underline the fact that we in the Labour Party do believe in reform of the State sector. We will support initiatives to reform the State sector where they do lead to better outcomes for the public and the more efficient delivery of public services. That is why we are willing to support this part of this piece of legislation. We will talk more about further parts that we are less supportive of but we support this particular part because there has been a call for greater integration amongst the agencies working in the public health area and we believe that this bill will go some way to delivering on that.  
I move to new section 58 in clause 6 the objectives of the new Health Promotion Agency. We think that those are good things for the Government to be focused on—promoting and encouraging healthy lifestyles. We do believe in preventing disease illness and injury. I think that we should think a little bit about how that last bit about preventing injury fits in the context of the Government’s other reforms. We have seen the Government within ACC actually taking the focus away from injury prevention within ACC. I think that one of the big mistakes of the National Government’s public sector reform agenda has been removing that real emphasis on injury prevention from ACC. It seems to stand in contrast to what this bill is trying to achieve.  
I move back to new section 58—enabling environments that support health and healthy lifestyles giving advice and making recommendations on the misuse and harm of alcohol. Again these are things that we in the Labour Party certainly support and we think those are worthy roles for the Government. Of course coming back to the first one promoting health and encouraging healthy lifestyles I remember not that long ago maybe 3½ years ago the then National Opposition coming to this House—I was not a member at the time but I was a follower of Parliament—and decrying many of the public health initiatives of the last Labour Government as being nanny State. It said that the nanny State had no role in telling people how to be healthy. Those were the sorts of things that National members were promoting back then. I am pleased to see that they have seen the light and they now believe that there is a role a positive role for the Government in promoting health and encouraging healthy lifestyles. That is something that we in the Labour Party have believed in for quite some time.  
We have believed in the role of the Government in public health and in preventive health measures. We would far rather spend money to prevent people from getting ill and to make sure that people live full and healthy lives rather than take the Tony Ryall approach which is to focus on all of the measures of performance when things go wrong. So what Tony Ryall has done is focus the health sector so much on measures such as operations elective surgeries and so on rather than on preventive measures and on public health measures which is something that we in the Labour Party believe the health sector should be focused on. There should be far more focus on preventing illness rather than the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff approach which is what Tony Ryall has done. The way he has politicised the performance measures of the health service I think has been a real shame. There are elements of what he has done with the measures that I think have been good. However I am really concerned that those measures those performance targets that he has put in place have distracted attention away from wider public health measures wider public health programmes.  
So I hope that this new Health Promotion Agency will go some way to restoring the balance there and will have the support of the Government. Establishing an agency is all very well but if it does not have the support of the Government in its activities then it is not going to be very successful. I hope that the National Government now having finally conceded that there is actually a role for the Government in promoting health and encouraging healthy lifestyles and preventing disease illness and injury will adequately support this agency because so many of its other policies—take preventing disease illness and injury and promoting healthy lifestyles—and changes it has made within schooling within the education system have gone in the opposite direction.  
We have seen a reduction in funding for Healthy Eating - Healthy Action the HEHA programme in schools which would seem to be in stark contrast to what this bill is trying to achieve. I visit the primary schools in my electorate all of the time. I think one of the really positive things that primary schools are doing is planting vegetable gardens within the primary schools teaching kids about growing vegetables and about eating healthily. I think that is a really really beneficial public health initiative which is supported by the education sector and it will lead to better longer-term health outcomes for all New Zealanders by teaching kids the value of eating healthily and growing vegetables. There are other advantages of course of teaching kids how to grow vegetables. I am amazed at how many kids who until the time when the schools started planting vegetable gardens would not have had any idea where vegetables came from. So I think that is a very positive initiative.  
The schools in my electorate all tell me now that they are struggling to get the funding to sustain those healthy eating healthy action programmes like the growing of vegetable gardens in schools. We will pay the cost of that in the longer term if we have a less healthy student and child population. We will pay the cost of that in the long term. 
 Preventing disease illness and injury does involve the Government taking a proactive set of measures a proactive set of actions in a number of areas. If we are talking about disease and illness we have to look closely at the link between disease illness and poverty and people living in unhealthy houses. I want to acknowledge that the Government has not done everything wrong here. I think that some of the stuff it has done around better home insulation has been a very positive thing and something we in the Labour Party will certainly acknowledge is that having warmer drier houses is good. However we have still got a long way to go. In the State housing area in particular there is still a long way to go before we have all State house tenants living in warm dry healthy homes. If we are talking about getting serious about preventing disease and illness that is certainly something that we would like to see a much greater focus on within the Government.  
Finally just to sum up on the issue of injury prevention I do think that the ACC cuts that the Government has introduced where it has reduced the funding for injury prevention programmes within ACC have been a really bad step. It has taken us down a path that in my view is counter to what this bill is trying to achieve. So I hope now that there has been a change of Minister for ACC—the letter writer is no longer there and he is no longer in the way of making progress there—we might see ACC restore a bit more focus on injury prevention rather than simply being the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Thank you.