Cheung CarlosDr CARLOS CHEUNG (National—Mt Roskill): Budget 2024 is a Budget for the squeezed middle. For the first time in 14 years hard-working Kiwis—like people in Mt Roskill—will get to keep more of what they earn through our Government tax relief. From 31 July this year an average-income household will receive tax relief of up to $102 a fortnight and eligible families also receive a FamilyBoost childcare tax credit of up to $150 per fortnight. This will make a real difference to hard-working Kiwis who have endured a prolonged cost of living crisis. Most importantly these changes will be fully paid for with offsetting saving and revenue initiatives meaning tax relief won't require additional borrowing and won't add to inflationary pressure.I know my constituents are excited about the Budget and they want to know more but today as a member of the Health Committee I would like to focus on how Budget 2024 is making a meaningful difference towards getting our health system back on track. Just now we hear a lot of things from the opposite side of the House talking about things going backward. They love to use data. Let's talk about things going backwards and targets. Let's talk about emergency department (ED) wait times. In 2017 91 percent of the patients were being seen within six hours. What happened? Under the Labour Government it dropped to only 76 percent. What does that mean? That means 90000 more New Zealanders are waiting more than six hours at ED. Let's talk about immunisation rates. The immunisation rate of children aged 24 months dropped from 92.4 percent in 2017 to 82.9 percent. This is what I call things going backwards. Our healthcare system is facing a major workforce shortage. This is what I call things going backwards.As a part of Budget 2024 health is getting a significant funding boost of $16.69 billion across three Budgets as part of our plan to invest in our front-line services such as emergency departments primary care medicine and public health to ensure New Zealanders can get the healthcare that they deserve.Let's talk a little bit about health investment in Budget 2024 over the four years included. Well listen $3.44 billion for hospital and specialised service for Health New Zealand; $2.12 billion for primary community and public health through Health New Zealand; $1.77 billion for Pharmac to fix the shortfall left by the Labour Government. We ensure that Kiwis can get access to the medicines they need. We talk about $31.2 million to extend our free breast screening to an additional 60000 women each year.What we also target is the ongoing workforce issue in our healthcare system. Budget 2024 is also investing $22 million to train 24 more doctors each year—that's enabled the University of Auckland and Otago University to increase their combined medical school first-year intake which will see more doctors graduating and entering the health workforce.People in Mt Roskill are also concerned about the broken mental health system. Budget 2024 will invest $24 million for free mental health counselling services through Gumboot Friday providing 160000 hours of free counselling sessions for New Zealanders aged between five and 25. We also allocate another $24.5 million for mental wellbeing support for primary and intermediate school students. This is how we target the issues.Our Government our Budget 2024 is committed to investing in our healthcare system because we are a Government that listen to people we work for people and we deliver for the people especially for the hard-working people in New Zealand especially the hard-working residents of Mt Roskill. I support this bill to the House.