Heatley Phil: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Heatley Phil: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 18 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:7777. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL HEATLEY (Minister of Fisheries) 
: 
 I thank Labour members for applauding me before I start my speech. It is a wonderful pleasure to have that ovation. After 1 year in Government National is working hard to deliver on its election promises and to deliver a brighter future for New Zealanders. We are seeing some of the signs of that recovery thank goodness! No longer is the economy looking like the Labour Party polling record: it is no longer diving in the way that Labour support is. We have put in a rolling maul of initiatives to protect families from the sharpest edges of the recession and it is working well. 
I will take members behind the thinking of the way that we are dealing with the recession and I will comment particularly on the fact that we are pumping capital expenditure into the economy by investing in infrastructure. That is investment in roads investment in housing investment in schools and investment in broadband. What John Key did—and members might be interested in his approach—was to suggest to Ministers around the table that we should stimulate the economy by investing in the infrastructure that is creaking in this country and in infrastructure that needs investment like roads and broadband. 
Mr Key said that we should dust off all the reports that the previous Labour Government had on the shelf and all the previous announcements on new roads broadband and new schools that the Labour Government had announced once twice or three times. Those reports relate to all the times that the Labour Government brought out a review about roading and said that it would form a committee or an action group that it would have a meeting on it and that it would have an independent review on it. Mr Key said that we would dust off all those reports and go down and actually build the roads. He said that we should get some money out and invest in houses do up the schools that require investment and invest in broadband. In other words he said that we should get some cash and actually do all the great projects that the previous Labour Government talked about. Mr Key told Ministers to take off the shelf all those projects collecting dust sort through them decide which were the ones that we could do quickly and then invest in them. What did he do? He invested half a billion dollars over 18 months to get the roads built. It has been an absolute delight I can tell members to see more roads being built and more schools being invested in. 
But I can also tell members about one point of shame. We have seen New Zealanders take up the insulation scheme across this country—180000 houses across New Zealand will be insulated top and bottom over the next 4 years. People will no longer be living in cold and squalid conditions knowing that Labour would do nothing about that. Labour did nothing about that in regard to State housing and it did nothing about that in regard to private housing. It has been a delight to be involved in that process. 
That raises the other point of shame which is the way that the previous Labour Government for 9 years refused to fund Herceptin. While claiming that it supported women it refused to fund Herceptin. John Key was in Government for 10 minutes and we saw Herceptin funded for the early stages of breast cancer. National is rescuing those women but for a decade the previous Labour Government said that the bureaucrats would not let it fund Herceptin. 
Members of the previous Labour Government said the bureaucrats would not let them help women with early-stage breast cancer. They said they refused to do that because bureaucrats said they should not fund Herceptin yet John Key was in Government for 10 minutes and he funded Herceptin. I can tell members that on this side of the House that is the sort of thing we are proud of achieving in this first year. It is interesting to know that the Labour Party is calling meetings up and down the country to get support. We have heard that it is hiring Portaloos but no one is turning up.