Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. These are indeed very extraordinary times and it cannot have been easy for the Government and the Minister of Finance to pull together a Budget in the context of what was such a rapidly evolving situation that we faced with the COVID-19 pandemic. But frankly they should have tried a little bit harder to be more realistic about their financial projections and what they are going to spend this eye-watering sum of money on.Before I go into some of those projections I just want to reiterate the point that the Hon Paul Goldsmith made in his intervention around this clear contradiction between the tired old mantra of nine years of neglect and pivoting so quickly over the fact and what a relief it is that our financial situation is in such good shape because I think it's really important to point out that before COVID things were going backwards. It took this Government just two years to turn a solid surplus into a deficit in the best economic times this country has seen in a generation. The only reason debt to GDP was dropping was because the economy was growing. They certainly weren't repaying any of it. So it's really important to point out as I go into detail in the Health Vote—but the economic picture more generally—things were bad and getting worse before COVID.While this is as I say a very difficult Budget to write in that context let's not candy coat where we were at. This Government took a good economy and made it worse. Indeed the projections in here as was pointed out to the Secretary to the Treasury and the Epidemic Response Committee meeting last week are frankly heroic. I want to just touch on the issue of Crown revenue because the actual Crown revenue last year was $93.5 billion. This Budget is forecasting our current year—because we won't know that position until October—at $89.5 billion. Now we were on track to meet whatever that budgeted revenue was and that $4 billion backslide happened in the last six weeks. Yet this Budget projects Crown revenue next year to be only $2.5 billion less than that: $87 billion to the Crown. So for all the reduced spending which creates a reduction in GST; for all the unemployment that is heading our way and has already started that means that people are not paying as much PAYE; for all the economic carnage that is going to be produced by companies going to the wall and at very best making a loss but surviving—no Crown revenue from that—this document says By the way all of those things are going to result in just a $2.5 billion drop in Crown revenue." I'm sorry; I cannot see how on earth that can be right. I think actually there was an admission that many of these projections were done in early March to inform this Budget. Well we should throw this out and recognise that that revenue is simply not coming into the Crown coffers. What does that mean? It means that that $140 billion that we think we need to spend just to stay afloat is going to be even greater. We will have to go into more debt saddling future generations with greater interest and greater repayments for generations. That goes therefore to the importance of making sure that spending is of appropriate quality and in the right things. I agree with Ms Davidson that through these times we do need to protect and support our most vulnerable. My Government the Key-English Government in those years following the global financial crisis and the Canterbury earthquake did just that—not that they got any credit for it from the other side but indeed that is an appropriate thing. But when it comes to infrastructure spending health spending other social development conservation spending it's got to be of a high quality. I don't think we can say—in fact we don't even have enough detail yet to be able to say—whether that is going to be the case. This is a war chest but is it a recovery war chest or an election war chest?Now I want to touch on Vote Health. There is a significant sum of money going into DHBs: $980 million per year is going to DHBs and that is as it should be. It did need a bolus of money in order to continue that sector. But let there be no illusions lest people who are listening be under any impression that that is going to result in a single extra treatment. Here's why. We don't have the latest data because the Minister of Health seems to be not only ambivalent but allergic to information. These are reports remember that last year sat on his desk for seven weeks before he even knew what the combined financial deficit of DHBs was. As at January this year they were already in $304 million of deficit combined and they were heading for $560 million of deficit. Annual inflation in DHBs is about $400 million and when you add the extra $100 million a year that the DHBs will need to spend because of the Holidays Act remediation their spending next year is going to be at least $1.1 billion to recover deficits and manage inflation. They got $980 million. They're going to go backwards even with this unless something happens. But this is a Minister who in question time today admitted that it didn't matter what came out the other end as long as you're putting lots in the top—whether it was people or money or kindness that's OK. Well actually you know what? Kindness doesn't replace the hip cure the cancer check the diabetes screen for cervical cancer; organisation of resources does. So the bolus of money is good but let's not pretend this is going to make a blind bit of difference to the health of New Zealanders. Now I would say this: the positive aspect of the spending is in disability support and I'm sure Mr Ngaro will talk a little bit more about that—$833 million if memory serves. But I make two comments about this. There is no detail behind how that's going to be spent and when the Associate Minister of Health or the Minister for disability support—I can't remember which one it was—was asked by a reporter last week about whether that would mean that people with profound hearing loss would finally have equity this Government having cruelly taken away the extra funding the previous Government had put in for extra adult cochlear implants they couldn't even say yes or no to that. Now either they're not going to do that and they just didn't want to say it or they're not even organised enough to say yes. And why should we be surprised by that? The mental health funding from Budget 2019 of $460 million - odd hasn't even been spent; three point something million dollars of $460 million has been spent. And this goes to the point. Hope is not a plan. Allocation of money is not a plan. The fact that people would like something to happen doesn't make it happen. There is no sense of purpose in this Government; there is just hope and cash and that ain't going to get people well. And then of course there is that silent group of heroes in our health sector the midwives who took the previous Government to court in a very novel way to get equity under section 88 of the Human Rights Act; because they weren't employees therefore they didn't have the protections under employment law. The previous Government set up a mediated co-designed process to understand what the proper value of a midwife was and the Minister of Health received that report nearly three years ago. He got his Ministry of Health to apologise frankly on his behalf for the fact that they didn't put a Budget bid in in 2018. They didn't put a Budget bid in 2019 and went to the College of Midwives to explain that that was all going to happen in 2020. Budget 2020 has come and gone and midwives are still waiting. The college issued a press release last week to say they were perplexed. Well they should have been apoplectic frankly at having been ignored once again by this heartless Government that does not care about midwives; it does not care about parents and their babies. And as a consequence the health of our most vulnerable New Zealanders our newest New Zealanders is now at significant risk because those independent midwives are leaving. They've had enough of this Government. They've had enough of the talk and no action. And actually that's what this Budget says about health: throw some bucks at it to solve the huge fiscal hole that they themselves created and then walk away. That is not good enough."