SpeechTODD MULLER (National—Bay of Plenty): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. One of the great privileges of the nine years that I've had as the MP for Bay of Plenty is to the best of my ability being an advocate for a community that is growing rapidly. I've had a number of successes and I feel very grateful for them. But as I look to embrace the twilight of my political career there is an area that I have immense regret about on behalf of my community and that is the appalling delivery of mental health services in Tauranga. Tauranga I think for many in the Wellington bureaucracy is still the small seaside town that it was when I was a young boy but in the time that I have been an MP it has grown from 140000 to 175000. It was 27000 when my parents bought a Chinese gooseberry orchard just north of Tauranga and it is under huge pressure in terms of service delivery not only infrastructure but also health. I accept that this is an issue that goes beyond a single term and beyond a single Government. But I see across the House my friend and colleague from the other side Angie Warren-Clark and the two of us coincidentally had the same campaign promise in 2017 to our electorate which was that we would work hard to ensure that mental health provisions were improved in the city—and in particular residential—and we were pleased to see that the Government two years later announced $30 million to be spent for a residential mental health facility in Tauranga. It's now 2023. The $30 million has largely been spent. It's been spent in Whakatāne and Tauranga still does not have any additional facilities for people with acute mental health needs and unlike other cities it has absolutely no residential options for anyone under the age of 18. Where this gets particularly challenging is when you have parents ring you and your office asking for help asking for navigation of the health system because they are completely at their wits' end trying to be there for their child who is still a child but cannot access the support and then when you have to have and listen to the conversation when they ring again and say that the help didn't come in time and they now have lost that child—this is a reality that my office has experienced and I suspect it's been experienced by Angie as well. We have to do better. I appreciate that this is not a conversation where we spend time finger-pointing; it's a time actually when we reflect as members of Parliament on our own local issues and our own communities and how we can do better. We have to do better than seeing a city that is growing at the pace of Tauranga simply unable to be able to be there for our most vulnerable young people—and vulnerable people full stop. We have a city of 170000 where we have 24 residential beds to assist people who have acute mental health issues and that number has been unchanged for over 25 years—four Governments have come and gone in this time. This is not me just unloading on this Government; this is a challenge for a city that simply does not have the support that it needs. When you come to the conclusion of your political time you always look and recall the things that you're the most proud of and I have many. But this really sits with me in a very uncomfortable way because I feel that I just haven't been able to break the inertia that sits in our health system—particularly in a Wellington context—to provide the support that the people I was sent here to represent are desperately needing and are not getting. I think as a House we must do better because the cries of the Bay of Plenty echo throughout the country. Thank you.