Kuriger Barbara: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKuriger Barbara: General Debate[Sitting date: 25 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11263. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]BARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): I am very much looking forward to tomorrow’s Budget and I just want to reiterate a point that my colleague Ian McKelvie mentioned before which was that small towns are turning round. He talked about Taumarunui and he and I share the King Country together. I have been in Taumarunui with him recently and we have been looking at some fantastic options around health which I am going to touch on in a minute because I am going to talk today about health.But before I do you know small towns are turning round and I am really excited because we have got a fantastic road happening right in Taranaki - King Country that is going to open up a lot more tourism productivity and people coming through between Taranaki and the Waikato. We have also had a pre-Budget announcement of 80 more beds on the Timber Trail at a little place called Piropiro. It is a wonderful place in the Pureora Forest—that again is going to enhance tourism.But today I want to speak about health and I want to speak about small towns turning round. Recently we had the Prime Minister in Te Kūiti and the Taumarunui Community Kokiri Trust came across and talked about the work that it was doing in health. The work that it is doing is an indication of how primary health care close to home is changing in our electorates. So what it is doing is it is actually becoming a group of navigators who are able to help people not only with their health but also with their social housing and with directing them to all sorts of places that they need to go for their health and well-being.If I look at what is going on now we have got extended free GP visits and prescriptions for under-13s and we are immunising more children but there is even better than that to come because $39 million is going to be invested this year to enable Pharmac to provide more New Zealanders with access to new medicines. The biological examples that we are starting to see now—like Opdivo which has come to the fore in the debate around melanoma and the advanced melanoma treatments—are starting to do some wonderful things for people so I am really rapt to see that there is $39 million that will be invested this year and an extra $124 million over 4 years. I actually have a very dear friend called Sarah who was on trials of the Opdivo drug and she was not supposed to be alive—she was not supposed to be alive for probably about the last 18 months to 2 years. Sarah is thriving and well so I am really pleased to see that we have got extra money to go to Pharmac which is going to allow it to look at these new medicines that are really coming to the fore.I am also really chuffed to see a $97 million extra increase over the next 4 years for health research because health as we know it is changing and not only in the way we provide essential health services and medicines but also in the way we deliver it. It was a real buzz a couple of weeks ago in the last sitting week to have all the health buses lined up on the forecourt of Parliament. A lot of those things like breast cancer diagnosis small 1-day operations—there is dentistry there are kidney stone buses. But the exciting thing about this is as we start to look at the way health is delivered now we can start to do more diagnostics. So I am really excited that this money that is going into health research is going to be able to help us find new ways to deliver health that may not be focused around the hospital. It is a big effort for some people to travel a very long way to hospital so if we can get the health care to come to them that is going to be fantastic. It is going to be great for the regions.The other thing we did we had the Rural Health Alliance down there. There is a whole collective of people coming together and we had some fantastic opportunities—I think right across the parties in this House—to interact with those people. They did a whole lot of strategising and they have been to our offices and talked about that. So there is a vibrant community out there.The mental health work is going on with the extra half a million that was given last year. I am really excited about the regions and I am really excited about the way we are starting to deliver health care to those regions. Thank you.