Hague Kevin: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: General Debate[Sitting date: 10 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9246. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): My contribution I hope will be somewhat different in tone. I want to reflect on some of the events of the week in the health sector. First of all I will pick up on the statement released today by the College of Public Health Medicine which is the professional body representing those doctors who are the experts in preventing illness in New Zealand. What they had to say today was that the long-term effects of child poverty will be too costly for the health and prosperity of all New Zealanders. They finger child poverty as the No. 1 health problem in this country.That comes on the heels of yesterday’s announcement of research from the University of Canterbury that linked New Zealand’s high rates of childhood asthma some of the very highest in the world with New Zealand’s cold damp housing stock. Again that is pretty congruent with what the college had to say today.And then the day before yesterday we read in the newspaper that the Ministry of Health had reviewed the Government’s $24 million campaign on rheumatic fever. What it had to say was that although that campaign was achieving some good things it was failing to tackle the fundamental causes of the rheumatic fever epidemic and therefore would fail in its central objective of stamping out the rheumatic fever epidemic in New Zealand.Again those fundamental causes of the epidemic that the ministry drew attention to were our stock of overcrowded and damp housing poverty—once again—and access to medical care for the poorest New Zealanders. So we have had a week—3 days so far this week—where one wonders what tomorrow will bring. In those 3 days those same factors again and again are being drawn attention to.New Zealand has in addition to one of the highest rates of asthma in the developed world one of the very highest rates of rheumatic fever. The Government’s attention was drawn to this in 2010 by the Public Health Advisory Committee which found that New Zealand has a rheumatic fever rate 14 times the OECD average—14 times. That is an outrage and it is a scandal.The problem with the approach the Government has taken—the reason why it will fail—is that the Government has not understood something very basic about how health outcomes actually get formed. The Government has a model that is based on individual risk factors and individual behaviour such that it cannot understand or deal with the big social and environmental issues that actually shape health outcomes. So poverty it does not understand; overcrowding it does not understand; racism it does not understand; and it does not intervene in those factors as a result.The Public Health Advisory Committee report which I mentioned set out a programme of action to deal with those systematic factors that were driving not only the rheumatic fever epidemic and not only asthma but all of those other big health problems that this country faces. So far the Government has failed to act on virtually every aspect of that plan apart from one.The one element that the Government has so far contributed positively to has been the Warm Up New Zealand campaign a programme of action that the Green Party has been pleased to be part of and to work on in partnership with the Government. Some 200000 New Zealand homes have been insulated and the homes that have been insulated so far have brought this country around an estimated $1.3 billion worth of benefits and yet it seems that that programme may be in doubt for the future. What the Green Party says to the Government is that a warm well-insulated home for every Kiwi family is not a “nice-to-have”; it is something that is a health necessity. We look forward to continuing to work with the Government in the future on that programme.