Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National): People say that eventually pet owners become like their pets in how they act and even how they look. To that end this Labour Government is looking more and more like their COVID response and as I will demonstrate this Government can be well described in terms of common COVID vocabulary consistent with other debilitating diseases.I can confidently say that this Labour Government is a negative-pressure Government. They are a negative pressure in health education gangs and the economy to name but a few. A negative pressure is also known as a vacuum—the principle behind vacuum cleaners. This is of course consistent with the DNA of the Labour Party which is littered with names such as Street and Dyson. A vacuum sucks everything up and mixes it all equally in the rubbish bag. This negative-pressure Government hoovers up taxpayer money in the belief of socialist mixing. At the same time however Labour's negative vacuum also hoovers up the dreams of New Zealanders and spits them out in the exhaust of life. This is a negative-pressure Government.Managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) is another word describing this Government's pantheon of failures especially the lottery of misery that was the MIQ lottery. I think Labour also used the MIQ lottery as a policy creation forum—a focus group if you like. I say this because when the Government was considering transport options across the Waitematā Harbour including the doomed cycle bridge the MIQ lotteries site put up a selection of nine images and asked the question Which is a bridge?" Clearly they didn't even know what a bridge looks like; no wonder the cycle bridge failed.The Government has spent more than $6 million on Ernst & Young consultants in Wellington to restructure a health system in the middle of a pandemic. I propose that Labour's definition of PPE is not personal protective equipment but that PPE in this Government's hands actually stands for the pension plan for Ernst & Young.This Labour Government has further borrowed COVID terminology from rapid antigen tests (RATs). It is now actually used to select Labour candidates for 2023 and is known as the Labour re-election assessment tool. It works exactly the same way as a RAT test: they take a couple of drips put them in a hole and see if they turn red.As the COVID response has languished so the health system is languishing. When did we ever think that a person with typhoid fever would be recommended to sleep in their car in the carpark at Middlemore Hospital? When did we ever think that all nurses at Wellington Hospital would issue a provisional improvement notice because the nursing shortage puts them at risk of being unsafe? When did we ever think that nurses in aged residential care would be submitting almost daily section 31 notices to the Ministry of Health saying they are at risk of practising unsafely due to nursing shortages? And we got some of the numbers today: 3000 nurses short—2663 registered nurses 310 midwives—a 23.8 percent vacancy rate.What is the plan for the health workforce? No one sees the plan and no one believes that this Government can actually make change. If we look at some of the proposed plans for nursing recruitment the Kiwi Health Jobs plan springs to mind. It was announced in a vaunted way in November last year—$115000 from district health boards $300000 from the ministry—to bring critical care nurses to New Zealand. It was actually launched in February—let's work on that. Announced in November launched in February—hard to explain. And by April with three weeks to go for $115000 it had employed the grand total of three—three critical care nurses for the much vaunted Kiwi Health Jobs recruitment campaign.Again how did we find ourselves in this situation? I think we'll look back and we'll look back at the failure to build ICU beds in that period between alpha and delta strain—that 15 month period will be a critical point in time. Because we didn't have enough ICU beds we had restrictions social restrictions and we cancelled surgery. That accounts for about 20000 of those people waiting four months to see a specialist; the other 15000 were there long before COVID arrived.I come back to my opening statement: this is a negative-pressure Government a vacuum a suction that is sucking the lifeblood out of New Zealanders splitting us apart and hoovering up all our dreams. Lifeless bloodless—this Government needs to be put out of its misery. Time for a change—National has a plan."