Hague Kevin: Crown Entities Reform Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: Crown Entities Reform Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 22 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2247. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to take a call on the Crown Entities Reform Bill. I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to the officials and to the members of the Government Administration Committee who kindly allowed me to join them for consideration of the submissions on this bill and in particular to the chair of the committee Ruth Dyson. I also express my appreciation to the submitters on the bill. There were some thoughtful submissions some of which have already been mentioned.  
I want to just in passing raise the issue of a procedural matter that is addressed tangentially in the report from the committee which is that because of the timing of this bill the process followed by the committee prior to the 2011 election was to open submissions but have no closing date. No closing date was effectively set until this Parliament’s Government Administration Committee was convened and chose to pick up the business including this bill. What that meant for submitters—and possibly this was a necessary process given the rules we have to work with—was that many organisations who had an interest and a stake in this bill and who wished to have their views heard either were not aware that submissions were open or were not aware of when submissions were going to close. Certainly we heard quite a lot of feedback from potential submitters that they were frustrated and angry about that lack of clarity. I think it would be useful for perhaps the Business Committee or perhaps your own office Mr Speaker to look at that matter to see whether that could be tidied up to better reflect a good process for submitters in the future on other bills.  
The Green Party opposes this bill and we do so reluctantly because there are aspects of it that we support. When the bill should it proceed is split into several separate bills there is at least one of those that we will vote for. The part of the bill that we support relates to the creation of the Health Promotion Agency.  
There has been some commentary both from the Minister’s speech at the start of the second reading on the bill and from officials that this is a bill that has been drafted to give effect to the Ottawa Charter on health promotion. I am a bit of a fan of the Ottawa Charter and so I was very excited to think that a bill would be giving specific effect to it. It is possible that the Minister may like in the Committee stage to move a Supplementary Order Paper to more explicitly give effect to the Ottawa Charter in the wording of the bill. My concern is that although that is the rhetoric around the bill actually the bill does not go that far.  
The Ottawa Charter is important because it establishes a new approach to health. Within the health sector we talk about the Ottawa Charter and health promotion as a socio-environmental approach to health and we contrast that with both the biomedical approach and also the health behaviour approach. The biomedical approach tries to explain patterns of health and illness in communities by the distribution of germs effectively or bacteria and viruses. In fact that explanation fails to predict what is actually observed in terms of distribution of health and illness. Then the health behaviour model came along. Health behaviourists say that it is not so much the viruses and the bacteria the biomedical causes of illness it is actually people’s lifestyle choices. So we see this phrase “healthy lifestyles”. That of course is an attempt to actually bring forward the theory of microeconomics—the rational decision maker—into the health arena. So the theory behind that is that a person will weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of a potential course of action or health behaviour and choose the “right” one. If we could only encourage people to make the right lifestyle choices then we would all be healthier.  
In fact again what we see is a pattern of health and illness that does not support that theory as the primary driver of health and illness. Instead what we see is disease clustered in particular communities and that is not because everyone in those communities makes poor lifestyle choices. What health promotion says and what the Ottawa Charter says is that that is because health and disease are functions of the level of empowerment of a particular community control over the life circumstances that people in that community enjoy and their relative marginalisation. So what the Ottawa Charter says—and I talked about this a little in the first reading speech—is that if the nation wishes to improve the health of communities we must improve the social and physical environment surrounding those communities and give those communities greater control over their life circumstances. It is a profound change and I would like to pay particular tribute to this Minister and this Government for their bravery in deciding to set up an agency with the specific function of enacting the Ottawa Charter.  
If the Minister chooses not to be more explicit about that in a ministerial Supplementary Order Paper at the Committee stage then I invite the new Health Promotion Agency to take it from the debate in this House that that direction is indeed the one that the Government wishes the agency to pursue. So that is a part of this bill that the Green Party supports and we will vote for a bill to achieve that.  
The second area that I want to comment on is the change that is being made around the Mental Health Commission. I spoke about this in my first reading speech and pointed out that mental health services have long been Cinderella services within the health sector. The Mental Health Commission was intended as the game-changer to try to very radically alter the direction. The Minister was quite correct in her remarks to say that it was intended that there would be a finite period for the Mental Health Commission but what I would encourage the Government to do is to reflect on the fact that the job is not yet done.  
In particular the reason why the Green Party will oppose the Government’s intention to fold the Mental Health Commission into the Office of the Health and Disability Commissioner is that the functions are so greatly different. What the Mental Health Commission has been great at doing is taking on a planning function for mental health services and then monitoring against the plan at a macro-scale. That is fundamentally different from the type of role performed by the Health and Disability Commissioner which has investigated individual cases and tried to draw on learning about that particular case to better inform the health services that are provided in the future. These are not the same functions and there is no case that has been made out to fold the Mental Health Commission into the Office of the Health and Disability Commissioner.  
My colleague Denise Roche is going to talk about the dreadful change that is planned for the Charities Commission. It is completely wrong and we will oppose that as strongly as we possibly can. Thank you.