Wall LouisaLOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): I neglected to add in my earlier contribution that the Minister received some advice about this piece of legislation from Treasury. It was one of the 12 recommendations in his briefing. Just to quote from that report Treasury said to the Minister that to Identify and remove unnecessary barriers to workforce flexibility starting by progressing the Health Practitioners (Replacement of Statutory References to Medical Practitioners) Bill" was important and the report also highlighted that this was a really good opportunity for the Minister to show some leadership in this area.I neglected to say earlier that there is a huge imbalance in our country between the number of doctors we have and the number of nurses we have. We have got approximately 14500 doctors and we know that in 10 years' time over 40 percent of those doctors are going to be retiring. We have 49769 registered nurses and 2815 enrolled nurses and there are 145 nurse practitioners.But what has been interesting to note is that in the nurse practitioner area actually it is providing a really good opportunity for Māori and Pacific nurses to take the next step in terms of qualifications. What I have seen from some of the results today is that it means that for Māori and Pacific women who have invested their time and energies into this particular sector there is an opportunity for equity. Because the nurse practitioner vocation will be able to undertake all these previously unlawful statutory functions that were in the domain of only doctors it has actually provided a huge opportunity and a huge business opportunity for our Māori and Pacific women that really I think has not been factored into the debate as much as it could have been. I think it is going to be one of those unintended consequences. I do not think Treasury highlighted it and it certainly has not been highlighted in any of the advice that we have received from the officials.But I think into the future it is a wonderful opportunity for Māori and Pacific businesswomen and actually women per se to pursue this nurse practitioner vocation. So I will be doing as much as I can to talk about the opportunity and in fact I think that there should be a paper possibly prepared for the Minister about how we promote this opportunity across our communities. From my perspective I think what will happen through the passage of this bill is it will just provide so many amazing opportunities particularly for women living in rural communities.I know that we are all really keen to progress the passage of this legislation but I just felt I needed to add to my earlier contribution particularly because our leader the Hon Annette King is not here—in terms of our Health Committee and our lead in the health area. I felt she would have wanted me to at a minimum put that case to the Committee in terms of our support for it. I am really excited that the public are going to have more competent health professionals from whom they can now access services and I see this as I said before as an amazing opportunity for women and actually for women to get some parity and equity. So we will be looking I think very closely at how the remuneration for this particular profession progresses. It should become comparable to the salaries of doctors and I think again this provides a really good scope or area for us to really scrutinise into the future. Thank you Mr Chair."