Pallett SarahSARAH PALLETT (Labour—Ilam): Thank you Madam Speaker. It gives me great pleasure to rise in support of Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Bill a bill which as we've heard will protect promote and improve the health of New Zealanders and will help to achieve equity by reducing health disparities among New Zealand population groups and in particular for Māori. Because you know we are only as healthy as the least healthy of our communities. It benefits us all to improve access to health services and to iron out the inequities experienced by Māori by disabled by Pasifika and by rural communities among others.I heard Mr Doocey earlier refer to pae ora this wonderful bill as a wrecking ball which was hyperbolic in the extreme. But actually as an analogy I can go with it because coming from Christchurch I know what you do with a building that's munted. I know what you do with a building that has botched repairs where we've tried our best over the years where it's old it's falling to bits it's not fit for purpose sewage might be seeping through the walls. Do you know what we do? We dismantle it carefully. We save what we can save those kauri doors and floors those lovely window frames and we build back better. That's exactly what we intend to do here.I'm going to speak here for a minute or two on the Māori Health Authority and forgive me as a Pākehā woman who has come from the United Kingdom. But I'd like to address a few remarks to those few correspondents who feel that Māori somehow are being given special treatment. Because quite frankly you don't want the health outcomes of our Māori whānau. Māori life expectancy is considerably lower than that of non-Māori. Mortality rates are higher for Māori than for non-Māori at nearly all ages and Māori health status remains unequal with non-Māori across all chronic infectious diseases as well as injuries and including suicide. Now the Treaty of Waitangi guarantees Māori equal access to national resources and the Government has an obligation to ensure that Māori have at least the same level of health as non-Māori. Now the Māori Health Authority will work as my colleague Dr McLellan said in partnership with Health New Zealand. But it's not just Māori Pasifika disabled people and rural people who will benefit.A little bit about me: you probably know by now that I was a midwife before I entered Parliament and a midwifery lecturer. I've worked both in rural and remote rural communities as a community-based lead maternity carer as well as in a busy central city hospital. I've seen the direct result of having multiple DHBs of various competencies that are unable to communicate with each other. I've seen the effects of having 20 DHBs all trying to do the same thing and using resources that should be better centralised. My colleague earlier Dr Liz Craig spoke of do it once do it right. Don't do it 20 times. Don't use 20 times the resources. Let's do it properly. In practice for me what it meant was that I could have a client in Canterbury and I could use the computer systems to input all their data into Canterbury District Health Board's system. But if they headed to Southland for a holiday or a break and they needed urgent care the systems were unable to communicate with each other. That's just one really really small piece of information and how we are negatively affected by the system that we have at the moment and why it is that building that just has botched repairs once too many times.So the DHBs as we've heard are going to be replaced by one national organisation. We're going to have a new Māori Health Authority. We're going to have a new public health agency. But this is all going to be done with a robust select committee process. I really look forward to hearing from the community and from the public about how we can make this piece of legislation the best possible legislation that we can because quite frankly that's what we do and we do it really well. I am personally extremely grateful for the forward thinking of these Ministers Minister Little Minister Henare and Minister Verrall who's obviously involved too. They have been courageous enough to face up to the inefficiencies of the current system and the inequities that it produces. They are facing up to our Treaty obligations and creating a health system that will serve us all now and in the future. I commend this bill to the House.