King Annette: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 14 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10650. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour): I am so glad that Minister Jonathan Coleman has joined us for this debate because one of his colleagues Minister Woodhouse was in the chair a moment ago and he talked about how proud he was of this Government’s record in health—Chris Hipkins: Positively puffed up.Hon ANNETTE KING: Positively puffed up—the Hyacinth Bucket of the Parliament. I have to say that I listened to some of the things that he said and I was questioning them—I have to say Minister—because he said there are 50000 more operations that have been done under this Government. I know for a fact Minister that you are counting 12000 of Labour’s operations done under the 2008-09 Budget—counting it dishonestly as operations done by the National—Hon Simon Bridges: No.Hon ANNETTE KING: Oh yes they are—12000 of them.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I will just freeze that. I will just warn the member that accusing a Minister of being dishonest—Hon ANNETTE KING: I did not say that he was dishonest Mr Chairman; I was very careful.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I think the member will now sit down. I will say that it has been ruled many times that accusing a Government or a ministry of doing something is the same as accusing an individual member of it especially the member in charge of it. So I am just asking you to take more care.Hon ANNETTE KING: Let me just rephrase: it is a very misleading claim by this Government that it has done 50000 more operations—counting 12000 done under the 2008-09 Budget. Will the Minister deny that? I will table it and show that is correct. I find that very misleading.He then went on to say that we are sending no patients to Australia for cancer treatment. Well I am glad we are not because I had to in 2000 and 2001. Does anyone know why I had to? It was because they received a report from the National Government in 1998 and 1999 that said our cancer services were in dire straits: we did not have enough linear accelerators we did not have enough staff and we could not provide this service. Do you know it took me months to get that report out of that Minister? I asked for it; they did not have it. They had never heard of it and denied it. I knew it existed because I did have a copy. I was testing the Minister and his ministry about being honest about cancer treatment.What I think is happening in this health sector is that there is $1.7 billion missing in the health budget. If you look at the budget and you look at the track that it has been on $1.7 billion is missing because the Government has not covered costs and it has not covered all of the demographic growth. That is not coming from Labour; that was independent work done by Infometrics. The Government has denied denied denied but we are now starting to see the impact of those missing dollars and we are seeing it in research that has been provided over the last few weeks. The Minister of Health may want to deny this research but it has been done by the University of Otago Faculty of Medicine. It is proper research printed in the Medical Journal and it has said something I think is very significant. I do not think the Minister has read it. It says “Patients undergoing primary elective total hip and knee replacement in Otago in 2014 are more severely disabled than between 2006-2010. Patients currently being returned to GP would have qualified for publicly-funded surgery during that period.” This paper confirms that the increasing demand is not matched by the increase in supply. “The problems we describe are likely to becoming increasingly widespread across New Zealand.”—that is proper research given to the Government which was denied by the Associate Minister of Health last week and continues to be denied by the Minister himself.We also now know because of data received from the Ministry of Health that we have eight district health boards that have been unable to provide the number of elective surgeries that they were expected to provide going right back to 2011. Two thousand one hundred and eighty one hip and knee procedures were supposed to be provided and were not provided during that period. I have to say to the Minister why were they not provided? Of course we know what he thinks. He said patients only think they need surgery; they do not actually need surgery—it is all in their minds. I challenge him to go and tell Grey Power that when they are asked whether they believe they need surgery because they are in pain and they cannot walk and they cannot go out and they are now housebound or whether it is all in their mind. Have a listen to what they may say.