Hague Kevin: Crown Entities Reform Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: Crown Entities Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 23 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2341. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 I rise to take another brief call on Part 1 of the Crown Entities Reform Bill partly to respond to some of the comments that the Minister of State Services made and secondly to make a further point. The Minister talked about some of the changes that the Government had made in public health programmes referring particularly to the Healthy Eating - Healthy Action programme. I cannot let that go unanswered because although that was presented as if it were a positive development it is important that the Committee knows that that change was in fact opposed by absolutely everybody working in public health including all of the experts on public health matters. It was a hugely retrograde step which took us a long way back. It reflected an approach from the Government that until now has not been very positive on public health matters and I am certainly aware of very many programmes throughout the country and in many areas of the health sector that have lost their funding or have lost sufficient funding that they have lost critical mass and are unable to carry out their very important functions.  
To put some actual numbers to that claim that I have just made in last year’s Budget—I am certainly mindful that there is another Budget due tomorrow—funding for Vote Health was reduced in actual dollar terms by 14 percent and that came on top of similar reductions in previous years. To actually reduce the budget not only in real terms but in actual dollar terms signifies a problem with the Government’s underlying approach to public health. As I have said I welcome the Minister’s comments about what I have had to say in this debate to date and I hope that this bill will signify a very substantial change in the Government’s attitude towards public health and towards health promotion.  
The second point that I wanted to make was I guess picking up on the question that Grant Robertson asked and the Minister answered about what the role would be for the Ministry of Health in public health and health promotion going forward. The particular point that I wanted to raise was a related question and that was what is happening with regard to section 14 of the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act which established the Public Health Advisory Committee. I am a person who used to chair that committee and it is a committee that I believe has done a lot of sterling work. Its reports for example on factors that lead to adverse public health outcomes—looking at social factors looking at environmental factors—have been extremely important. Its report on child health is a landmark report and there is the work that it has done on the health of prisoners for example—all extremely good and valuable work that has essentially stopped over the last couple of years. The National Health Committee must establish a Public Health Advisory Committee yet that committee has essentially not existed for a couple of years. Not only have the members of the committee gone but its secretariat has gone so it is entirely non-functional. It is a statutory requirement that the Government is not in fact implementing.  
That function of advising the Minister and advising the National Health Committee on public health matters is an extremely important one in the sector because as I have already outlined the kinds of things that we are looking at in health promotion very often—even though they are the interventions that have the biggest bang for their buck; they actually produce the most health gain for the dollar invested—may take a long time to actually realise those big gains. That is why it is important that we have a committee like the Public Health Advisory Committee that is able to take that really long-term view and provide that really high-quality advice to the Minister and to the National Health Committee to inform public debate about public health matters. And so I invite—