Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Chair. Before I get on to the substance of this debate I do want to join with the Minister of Health in thanking our health workers across the country who he described as stretched and indeed some of them very much are. I also want to thank the 5 million New Zealanders who have helped us achieve the goal that we have got to so far. We are not out of the woods yet but we are certainly progressing well and I want to acknowledge the efforts of the Government in ensuring that that's the case.But I have been reflecting actually on the way in which this has been done and actually casting my mind back to the fourth Labour Government who enthusiastically adopted the Thatcherite-Reagan - type mantra of there is no alternative". I've been thinking about the way in which the Government has approached level 4 lockdown and its extension and portraying this as the only thing we could have done. I was further reminded actually of an alternative acronym that came out I think from the Post Primary Teachers' Association a few years ago which was TIAARA and that is something like "there is always a reasonable alternative". That is going to be I think very very much the subject of debate now in terms of where we're at and the parlous financial state that our health system at least is in and the significant investment that needs to be made to—well I was going to say protect people. Well people are far from protected by the loss of their jobs and going on jobseeker support for the duration of which we just don't know.But the reality is there were alternatives. There were other ways. We know that around the world there were alternatives to the very strict lockdown we had and the non-COVID health impacts of that are going to be severe. We had Dr Chris Jackson on the TV this morning saying that as many as 400 New Zealanders could die prematurely from their cancers as a consequence of this lockdown. That is a massive massive cost that is not presently counted in the thinking that's going on. Our screening has stopped—our cervical screening our breast cancer screening our bowel cancer screening has stopped; cancer has not. That's the same with diabetes and heart disease and other non-communicable chronic conditions—that we have a stretched system as the Minister has portrayed—and they are not going away. We've heard from dentists and GPs and allied health professionals that they can be working safely and they can take pressure off the health system and we are now at the point—well depending on which definition Dr Bloomfield or the Prime Minister uses—of elimination whatever that means and yet we are still not allowing these people to practise the healthcare that New Zealanders need.I say stretched—I'm disappointed at the Minister for articulating yet the broken record of stretched balance sheets dating back as far as 2013 and sewage down walls a situation that was not only rejected but refuted by the very DHB that was the subject of that story because actually things got a lot worse on this Minister's watch. My question to him is rhetorically if he is so good why are things so bad because they have got terrible on his watch. The Health Committee heard in an annual review of financial ruin parlous situations of just about every single health organisation in his stable. I am now in possession—because it's on the website quietly uploaded again through the COVID crisis—of the latest financial report the combined financial performance of our DHBs which is now—and I keep using the term "eye-watering". I don't know how often I've said that. I sound like David Clark I'm that regular. Three hundred and four million dollars now in just seven months of this financial year—that compares with $230 million last year. And remember what we got to last year? We got to $432 million of combined fiscal deficits excluding the non - one-off costs. We've got a really really big problem with the Holidays Act; I would like to hear from the Minister about that but most of all I'm very interested in understanding what he is doing to remedy the tanking financial performance that continues for the third year in a row on his watch."