Soper Lesley: Official Information (Openness of District Health Boards New Zealand) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Soper Lesley: Official Information (Openness of District Health Boards New Zealand) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:641;Page:11199] 
LESLEY SOPER (Labour) 
: 
 Although a member of the Health Committee I was not going to take a call on this slight and insubstantial Official Information (Openness of District Health Boards New Zealand) Amendment Bill because I really thought the bill merely served as a warning for members new to the House to first breathe through their noses and try very simple tactics like a letter to a Minister. That is a very useful tactic that new members could think about. 
But I sit in the House and I listen as the conspiracy theorists in the National Party roll themselves out once again. They seem to be riding high again in their speeches on this bill. Or should I say the fiction writers of the National Party the hollow men of the National Party. Suddenly it appears that District Health Boards New Zealand is being portrayed by the other side of the House as the Voldemort of the health world. Next thing we will have Draco Malfoy and the Death Eaters appearing from the other side of the House. I am moved to get to my feet and say that that portrayal from the other side of the House is just wrong. This is an insubstantial bill. 
District Health Boards New Zealand is an organisation I had a bit to do with in my former life as deputy chair of a health board. It is a good organisation of which Labour members are proud. It is about collaborative and collegial operations. It is about coordination. It is about good people—many of whom I worked with in a former life—who lead health boards by working together and actually achieving very good results. It is all about delivering public health and putting the people back into public health. Those are things that the people opposite do not seem to know a lot about. That is quite different from the competitive dog-eat-dog business model that the members on the other side of the House seemed to think was their only one-trick pony in the 1990s. 
That reminds me that the members on the other side of the House still have only one trick and it is called a tax cut. We all know very well exactly what their plans for the tax cut would do to the health system which we have spent the last 8 years rebuilding after they spent the 1990s breaking down the infrastructure; closing hospitals; instituting secretive appointed health boards; bringing in bed-night charges; and mismanaging through a series of failed health Ministers with names like Mr English and Mrs Shipley disaster after disaster in the health system. 
The fact is that this bill was unnecessary. The Government found a way to achieve the same end by a simple Order in Council. [ 
Interruption 
] Those members should listen very carefully. An Order in Council was passed on 9 July and will come into effect from 3 September. The fact is the current health system actually prides itself on transparency and on increasing transparency. Targets and reporting are open under this very good health Minister and with elected health boards in place unlike in the past under the last National Government when there were Crown health enterprises or “CHEs” and other such strange beasts. Of course there will be plenty of times when District Health Boards New Zealand is not able to provide the information requested simply because it does not hold it or because it is commercially sensitive. But a simple Order in Council was all that was needed to make it possible. 
This slight and insubstantial bill—which is a bit like the party opposite who put it forward and continues to promote it jumping from insubstantial cloud to insubstantial cloud—was always an unnecessary bill. We will be voting against it because there was always a sensible way forward on this matter which the Labour Government found.