Hodgson Pete: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHodgson Pete: General Debate[Sitting date: 10 October 2007. Volume:642;Page:12230. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PETE HODGSON (Minister of Health): We have just heard a spirited address from a man who has more positions on taxation than can be found in theKama Sutra. This man changes his mind in the course of a week in the course of month and actually has been known to change his mind in the course of a question time. This man wants taxes to be cut but he wants interest rates to fall as well.The truth of the matter is that Bill English gave a spirited speech full of anger but the reality is that no matter how angry he wishes to be he cannot hide and no matter how much obfuscation he wants to put into place members in his party cannot take back the words they have been uttering over the past couple of weeks. They can scramble them but they cannot erase them. The truth is out. We now have a sense of the emerging ideology of this party that would wish to be a Government one day. We also have a sense of its incompetence.It started of course on Wednesday 26 September. A health document was to be released. It was given to the media. There was a line-up of National Party spokespeople. The leader was there the National spokesperson on health was there and the National Party health team—which keeps changing—was there too. In the 45 pages of that document there was no mention of an increase in general practitioners’ fees—not one.Darren Hughes: Not a word.Hon PETE HODGSON: Not a word. Because and only because the media persisted with their questioning the following words were uttered by Mr Tony Ryall: “We don’t support Labour’s fee control system. We’ll be knocking it on the head.”Darren Hughes: In that arrogant way of his.Hon PETE HODGSON: In that arrogant way of his. Did anyone see the television that night? Did anyone see the eyes of the caucus colleagues start to roll? A lot of people all of a sudden did not want to be there. They did not want to be in the room. They said to themselves noiselessly: “Oh dang! That was the bit we weren’t supposed to say.” But it was out. Mr Ryall had turned his press conference into a train wreck because he had tried to deny the position. That is what happened and I thank the media for their persistence.The truth of the matter is that the cover-up is where the farce really began. We saw Mr Key the leader of the National Party in a corner immediately reach for the market. We heard him immediately say: “Oh this is just like going to your accountant or your mechanic. If doctors put up fees people will go somewhere else.” Oh yeah! Will rural people go somewhere else? Will urban people go to an accident and emergency department instead? The point really is to ask why National would want to do that when we know that better heath outcomes follow cheaper access to general practitioners. Thisis not something that was made up by the New Zealand Labour Party; it is something that is found throughout the international literature. National members do not care about people’s health.Then the cover-up continued. Mr Ryall said: “Oh but I’ve been saying that for a long time. I said this in a speech. I’ve said it many times. This is settled policy and it shouldn’t be any surprise to any of you media people.” A question arises from that. If this was settled policy from the National Party and there was a 45-page document with photographs and graphs and things in it why was it not in the document? If it was settled policy why was it not in the document? There was comment in the document about universal primary health care but there was no argument in the document to say that it would be universal primary health care at a higher fee. That was not in the document.Then National started to go from bad to worse. Mr Key defended market forces as a means of keeping general practitioners’ fees at a reasonable level and then as ColinEspiner said in thePress he backed away from it. Mr Key then went on to say that he proposed the involvement of the private sector in both the building and the operation of State schools. Then he said he was talking only about construction. Mr Key denied talking to Macquarie Bank about a private-public partnership then he admitted talking to Macquarie Bank about a private-public partnership. Are members getting the pattern here? He backed away from Mr English’s suggestions that State assets should be sold and then he declared the Iraq war to be over. But what did he do the next day about the Iraq war? He said onbFM that the people on Radio New Zealand National had asked him about an invasion. They had not.