Dyson Ruth: General Debate 
Dyson Ruth: General Debate 
[Volume:656;Page:5682] 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 Before the last election John Key and Tony Ryall paraded around the country listening to what people said they wanted in their health system and then telling people what they wanted to hear—the Steven Joyce model of connecting with the public. They said they would give New Zealanders better sooner more convenient health care. They promised no restructuring and they promised reduced bureaucracy—I beg your pardon; their exact term was “less bureaucrats”. Let us leave aside the grammatical error but note that they promised there would be no restructuring and they categorically promised there would be no cuts to front-line health services. Yet now on an almost daily basis we see those promises being broken. In town after town and in city after city all across our country we see Tony Ryall’s and John Key’s broken promises. 
There is now proposed a massive restructuring the biggest restructuring in health in fact since Crown health enterprises were introduced by the then National Government. Under National we used to have a huge bureaucratic structure with 23 Crown health enterprises. I remember that when we went into the 1999 election we said we did not want to keep the 23 Crown health enterprises which by then had been renamed hospital and health services. We wanted to devolve decision making and funding to district health boards; Tony Ryall said it was an outrage that we were threatening to gut the then health and hospital services. Now he is doing exactly what he railed against. He is threatening to gut the Ministry of Health to set up a new very strong bureaucracy called the National Health Board and to take all local decision-making and innovation away from district health boards. We will see more bureaucracy rather than less we will see massive restructuring and we are already seeing cuts to front-line health services. The core promises that John Key and Tony Ryall made to the New Zealand public have been shown to be lies. Their promises are broken and their reputations are in tatters. 
What is worse though is that revealed to us now is the documentation behind the Horn report that Tony Ryall refuses to release. He would not even answer a question in the House today about what information he has received what instructions he has given to doctor that information and what he will allow to be released as the draft report. The documentation that accompanies the Horn report talks about wage freezes for doctors and nurses and we know that in the current economic climate a wage freeze is a wage cut. That is from the party that promised to narrow the wage gap between New Zealand and Australia and promised to support our front-line health workers. That party is now hiding documentation that says we will have wage freezes for nurses and doctors. 
The report says that in order to make more money out of our health system we should import a few foreign people put them in our beds in public hospitals and charge them big money. How will that give New Zealanders better sooner more convenient health services? How will that help the people in my electorate who have been told that their home support services are being cut? What will happen when an elderly woman from my electorate wants to go to Christchurch Hospital for an urgently needed surgical procedure and finds that someone from Holland is paying very good money for the bed she wants? Unless that woman is prepared to top and tail she will miss out. Low-income people and New Zealanders who have worked hard all their lives paying taxes and raising their families will have to wait while somebody from overseas who has never done a day’s work in our country but who has a lot of money can buy our public health services. That is a disgrace. 
And the big secret—and I am not at all surprised that Bill English wanted to hide this—is the increase in the age of superannuation. That is on the secret agenda.