Moroney Sue: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5545. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): Tēnā tātou e te Komiti ko Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori tēnei nō reira kia kaha tātou. Ki te kaupapa i tēnei wā.[Greetings to us the Committee this is Māori Language Week so we need to be energetic. And so to the matter at hand.]I want to address in the estimates debate on the health sector the issue of mental health. I note that the Minister of Health when he spoke before was very animated and in fact got a little desperate and started making some desperate accusations. But I want to address—again today it seems to be a day for this—an issue that is very close to my heart.The Minister announced just a few days ago a formal inspection of the mental health services at the Waikato District Health Board. I want to seek an assurance from the Minister that that formal inspection will be done in the context of a health system that we now know has $1.7 billion less funding than it should have had in order to keep up with the demands both the population increases and the inflation demands on the health budget. Even the Minister himself in question time yesterday accepted that the health budget has not kept up with inflation under this National Government. So I want to ensure that when this formal inspection of the mental health services happens at Waikato District Health Board if it is discovered that resources and funding are in fact one of the reasons why we have had problem after problem after problem in the mental health services there the Government will ensure that those issues are fixed and it will not use this as a whitewashing exercise.I listened very carefully to what the Minister said when he announced the formal inspection and he said it was necessary because people needed to be reassured about the mental health services and that sounds like the language of a whitewash to me. What I am interested in is knowing that the service is a quality service and that the most vulnerable people in our community are not put in harm’s way because of the underfunding of the mental health services and the health service in total that has happened under the estimates for the 2015-16 year.The thing that seemed to trigger this formal inspection was the discovery of a fraudulent psychiatrist being employed by the district health board but that is just the tip of the iceberg. I am now quoting from a letter that has been written by Dave Macpherson who is a local councillor in our area. He happens to be the father of a young man who lost his life when he was under the authority of the mental health services in Waikato. He has written to John Crawshaw who is going to do this formal inspection to ensure that he knows the full history.So not only have we had the fraudulent psychiatrist discovered in just recent days but in 2014 Mr Paul Fox was employed as a psychiatrist at the Henry Rongomau Bennett Centre. It was discovered that he had to hand back his licensing registration when he had worked in America because of an inappropriate sexual relationship between him and a patient. We have had Manilall Maharajh a psychiatrist employed by Waikato and Bay of Plenty district health boards who was found guilty of professional misconduct by the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal in 2013 after having sexual relations with a patient and paying her not to inform authorities about this. We have had Jason Luty a psychiatrist employed by the Waikato District Health Board in 2012 after leaving Essex in the UK under a public cloud after the publication of offensive pictures of his own children—and the list goes on.What I am suggesting here is that the Minister needs to make sure that this is a very thorough investigation because there is a range of issues that happened over a period of time. This though is the district health board after all that announced the formal appointment of the current chief executive officer just days before—in fact I think it might have even been only 24 hours before—a very damning report was published about that same person and the hospitals that he had been managing in Canada. So I can only ask that when the Government is doing this formal inspection of mental health services the inspection be more broad because the issue about employing people under dubious circumstances I think is more broad than the mental health services themselves. I want to implore the formal inspection to take seriously the issues that have been raised by Dave Macpherson.