McCully Murray: General Debate 
McCully Murray: General Debate 
[Volume:638;Page:8195] 
Hon MURRAY McCULLY (National—East Coast Bays) 
: 
 It has always struck me as deeply ironic that our Prime Minister should choose as the Minister to superintend the health services for 4 million New Zealanders a person who in his former life was a vet. Over the next few weeks we will see that that Minister will have some very difficult answers to provide because he now has a very serious problem. From 1 July the people who live in my electorate and over a million other New Zealanders will have no certainty available to them as to the provision of diagnostic laboratory services and they are looking to the Minister to give them some assurance on that. This is not a minor issue. Justice Asher in his judgment yesterday repeated the assertion of the chief executive of the Harbour Primary Health Organisation that community-referred diagnostic testing is at the very heart of primary medicine. That is true. But we now find ourselves in a situation where for one-third of the New Zealand public there is no certainty as from 1 July as to the availability of those services which lie at the heart of primary medicine. 
We find ourselves in that situation because of three reasons as I read the judgment. First it is because the prime mover behind Labtests Auckland winning the half-billion-dollar contract was instrumental in both the district health boards’ framing of the terms of that contract and in shaping the successful bid and in doing so had a huge conflict of interest as identified by Justice Asher. The district health boards according to the learned judge failed in their responsibility on numerous occasions to protect themselves against that conflict of interest. That is the first reason. 
Second the High Court has also found that that same Auckland District Health Board member improperly used inside information which he had acquired in the course of being a member of that board for the purpose of securing the half-billion-dollar contract. The boards which had an obligation under law to refuse to accept a bid from such a person not only received such a bid and processed it but also awarded the contract for half a billion dollars of public money to that insider. For that reason the contract has been struck down. 
Third the High Court also found that a process set out by law requires health boards to consult with members of the public—whose money they are spending—as they seek to reshape the health services in their region. Health boards have an obligation to consult with those who will be affected. The High Court judge has found in this case that the information provided to members of the public was not honest and accurate. The health boards failed to tell the public in Auckland what they intended to do to the diagnostic laboratory services that were supposed to serve the public. That is serious not just for the boards but for the Minister. The Minister must have known given the controversy that surrounded the awarding of the contract that there was an issue around the $20 million or $15 million of savings. He was on notice. He had a duty to inquire; he must have inquired. If he had inquired he would know that that $15 million worth of savings was not in fact from efficiency gains but from cutbacks to services and cost shifting that would take place as a result of the contract. The Minister wished to hide that from the public of Auckland and the district health boards also intended to hide it from the public of Auckland. 
The High Court judge yesterday found that the district health boards were in breach of their statutory obligations in hiding that information. Although the Minister was not in the dock he equally is able to accept that same finding from the judge—that he tried to hide that information from the New Zealand public. The district health boards and the Minister tried to hide the fact that the boards intended to cut staff numbers from 750 to 473. That is in the court documents. The number of pathologists was to be cut from 25 to 17. We were to see 50 percent of the samples be supplied by general practitioners who had not been consulted about that process and we were to see the routine turn-round time go from 12 hours under the old contract to 48 hours. Aucklanders were not told that about the contract.