Salesa Jenny; Lee MelissaASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Kia ora members. When we went to the dinner break we were still in the middle of the general debate. The next call is a National Party call.MELISSA LEE (National): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. It's rather an unusual day when we are actually doing the general debate slightly differently. I was trying to keep track of what number we were up to and it is my turn indeed.I'd like to talk about an issue that has come up which gave me grave concerns—and I've had many emails and also social media conversations on ethnic community sites using WeChat and KakaoTalk for example. The community is really really angry at the report that says Auckland surgeons are now required to consider patients' ethnicity to decide who gets an operation first. The Labour Government actually calls it the Equity Adjuster Score. I know that earlier the Labour members actually talked about how apparently it is us on the opposite side of this Chamber who are bringing race into the issue but it is in fact the Government that has actually made the race issue the prominent issue where people are feeling that they don't belong in this country. When you actually consider that the priority is to Māori and Pasifika patients on the grounds that they've had unequal access to healthcare historically—they said they have really bad health outcomes and that is the reason why they should be given priority. I don't have a problem with people being given priority when they have health issues—we should be achieving better health outcomes—but the thing is that need should be the decision maker. Need should be the criteria when people are attended to.If the historical thing actually matters should we be giving the New Zealand - born Chinese community a priority? The first Chinese arrived here in 1842 and they were the people who had to pay poll tax which was massive—£100 poll tax—and the thing is they weren't even made New Zealanders until the 1950s. The Helen Clark Government at the time actually apologised to the Chinese community for the way they were treated badly. They were called the yellow peril". If the ancient historical issue matters perhaps it is the Chinese people who should actually get priority rather than some other people? But that is not what I'm actually calling for. What I'm actually saying is that since the revelation I sort of got to thinking about this. Three weeks ago my son was involved in an accident. He was run over by a ute. He was dashed to the hospital and I was in here in Parliament and I couldn't actually get back home. The next day when I flew up he was in hospital in a lot of pain but when I see stories where Auckland Hospital is apparently giving priority to Māori and Pasifika patients does that mean that my son could have had more urgent treatment had he been Māori or Pasifika? Just because he is not does that mean I have to wonder "Did he not get the urgency he actually needed?" That is the concern of a lot of migrant populations that I have actually had comments from. They are saying "Do they need to leave this country to get fair treatment?"When I was looking at the news about Michael Wood I went back to his maiden speech. He actually said—and I quote—"Political trust in this country was badly corroded in the 1980s and 1990s by Governments of both stripes that regardless of what you might think about the contents of their programmes fundamentally broke faith with their electors." He also goes on to say "In my view then one of the core tasks of Government is to ensure that balance is maintained—a fair balance of interests power and resources recognising that an imbalance in any of these areas privileges some and inhibits others from achieving their potential and that such injustice will hurt us all in the end. I believe in a balance between having a clear world view and striving to achieve it and being open to the ideas of others." I have to say that that speech probably made a lot of impact but when you actually consider that when people think about the race of a person instead of their need for service in our health system it doesn't actually provide that fairness nor the justice that Michael Wood was talking about. I guess it symbolises and it is actually quite typical of this Government that what they talk about is not what they actually deliver and to me in reality it is symbolic of a Government that is a shambles."