King Annette: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
King Annette: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:624;Page:19407] 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Health) 
: 
 As a report card the financial review of the Ministry of Health from the Health Committee is very positive. One would not think so if one listened only to the previous speaker. He made a highly political speech but failed to tell the listening public a single thing that a National Government would change. I will tell the listening public why that is so. Don Brash has already told New Zealanders that National will not change the “highly complicated bureaucratic system” that this Government has set up. He said there are no votes in it. Mr Don Brash said that the public have no appetite to change the health system. Why does he believe that? He believes that because New Zealand saw a decade of “health reforms” under the previous National Government. They want to talk about bureaucracy! We had CHEs four RHAs and one THA. Then we had an HFA 23 HHSs and a plethora of organisations—business units etc. 
The changes that have been made by this Government have been overwhelmingly supported by the health sector of New Zealand. Its representatives tell me—and they tell Dr Hutchison—that they do not want another round of changes. They do not want to throw out 21 district health boards. They do not want to change what we are doing. They want to consolidate what we have in New Zealand; they want to get on with the job. 
So Dr Hutchison owes it to the Committee tonight to tell New Zealanders what National would change. Will it get rid of the 21 district health boards? He talked about bureaucracy but do members see that he forgets that there were 23 hospital and health service providers—not 21 district health boards but 23 hospital and health service providers—not to mention the huge bureaucracy that was in the Health Funding Authority. Let us remember that the chief executive of that authority earned $27000 a month as his pay and worked three days a week. We can talk about the waste and bureaucracy we had in the past; New Zealanders are not keen to see such changes. So I say to Dr Hutchison that he can wail all he likes and make the political points but then he should tell the people of New Zealand what a National Government would do. 
Let us talk about the Health Committee. I have heard a report from the select committee that is totally different from the one Dr Hutchison heard. I am sure my colleague the chair of that committee will talk about it in a moment. I know that boards appeared before the select committee to speak to their financial reviews and they told Dr Hutchison—although he may not have wanted to hear it—of the very very good things they were doing in primary health care. They are reaching out to those people who have diabetes or cardiac conditions. However that member who was a health professional asks where the health outcomes are. Anybody who understands health knows that if people want to track health outcomes they track them through morbidity and mortality. Dr Hutchison will see the improvement—even in the short time we have been in Government—in morbidity and mortality. Now that is interesting because that is how it is measured—not by asking the question: “How many people do you think you have saved today?”. I do not know what questions Dr Hutchison asked but he was told of the projects and programmes that have been put in place. We measure health in the same way that other countries do—that is around morbidity and mortality. 
It is interesting that we have seen for the first time an improvement in the health—mortality and morbidity—of Maori. That is one area where we have had a huge discrepancy in New Zealand. We know that Maori people in New Zealand do not live as long as other New Zealanders. We know that the difference in life expectancy can be as much as 10 years compared with other New Zealanders. We know they get sicker than other New Zealanders but we have started to see improvement. Is that not good? Is that not what we should be measuring in the way we run our health systems? That improvement certainly did not come out of the policies of the 1990s.