Reti Shane; Verrall AyeshaDr SHANE RETI (National): Thank you Madam Chair. There are further questions I would like to ask. The first would be question 18: why does the Health New Zealand website currently state that nursing wages and salaries in New Zealand are comparable to Australia and does the Minister agree with that? Question 19: I want to look back over leaked documents we had in the year in review from the Bay of Plenty District Health Board (DHB) and it was signed on behalf of every single senior medical officer (SMO) every single specialist and they made a number of points. Two of them were particularly pertinent. One of them was about haemodialysis patients where the specialist was saying patients say to them they would rather die than travel to Hamilton for their haemodialysis. Now I do believe there may have been some improvement in that situation with new seats at Waikato DHB but that was a very serious statement to make. But it was followed up by the SMOs at Bay of Plenty DHB which was what I think was as serious a statement. That is that people who had been waiting for management of bowel cancer who were curative at the time had waited so long that they became palliative. That's a very serious statement for surgeons and for medical people to make and I think there is some response required as to how we address that. It's just that one DHB—and I did allude to it—with the 31-day cancer treatment times.I think the other question I'd ask the Minister because she did talk about holiday pay as being one of the factors why the accounts are unaudited—this is getting to be a long period of time now; we're almost coming up for a year and the accounts are still unaudited. And I don't know what the statutory requirement is but that must be pushing the envelope. But what I would ask her is: the home-care and support workers legislation concludes on 30 June; how much has been put aside or will be appropriated and what is the size of redoing that 30 June home-care and support workers' pay equity legislation? My understanding is it's a big number. So my question is: what is that number and how has the Minister taken that into account?Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Minister of Health): I spot amongst some of the member's questions some that also feature in my written parliamentary question list so I can reassure the member that no I have not had any conversations about the impact of New Zealanders' new residency rights in Australia on the New Zealand health system. The member mentioned the faster cancer waiting-times performance metric and my comment to the member about that is this is a metric where I think it's really important to dig into the detail of what it means. So the metric applies to people who have quite a high probability of cancer at the time that they are first seen—so people with visible bumps or growths in some cases. So what that means is these are the people who are likely to have the worst outcomes from their cancer treatment. They reflect probably a fraction—maybe 20 percent—of the people's situation who have cancer at the time of their diagnosis. And it is desirable that the majority of people—in fact it would be great if it was all people—had their cancer diagnosed at an earlier stage because that's when you get the best outcomes for them. So that particular target applies to those who have the worst prognosis and so I caution the member about taking that as an indication of cancer services overall because if we were to optimise our system for that indicator we would not be using one that would really drive the best outcomes for all of the people with cancer that we seek to look after. I think an important thing to remember about the year under review is around the world cancer services were disrupted significantly and we saw challenges in cancer system performance all around the world. And in some international comparisons the New Zealand system really shone because of the work that our cancer agency was able to do in a joined-up system making sure that a similar approach to clinical care was taken by clinicians all around the country making sure that best practice was shared in terms of how you address COVID in these really complex clinical settings. And in some ways that's an indicator of the type of joined-up system and fast action we can take when we're in an emergency situation that is enabled by the health reforms that were brought in.A few other measures I can tidy up for the member now. The first three months of the establishment of Te Aka Whai Ora—they were yet to have their appropriations transferred at that stage and so that is the situation for them in the first three months of the current financial year.