Reti Shane; Rurawhe AdrianDr SHANE RETI (Deputy Leader—National): Thank you Mr Speaker and firstly tēnā koe to you and congratulations. To all my colleagues in this House: Kia ora mai tātou. Tēnā koe tōku whanaunga Kelvin. Tēnā koe mō ngā kupu ora. Tēnā koe.[Thank you all. To my relation Kelvin thank you. Thank you for your kind words. Thank you.]In 1832 US Senator William L Marcy effectively said: To the victor lies the spoils." And so it is with this Government and I congratulate them both for the privilege they have and the direct responsibility they now carry. I am of a view that the spoils of the victory are not Cabinet positions or ministerial warrants but rather the spoils are actually the hopes and aspirations of New Zealanders. It is this that we as an Opposition will hold the Government to account for. In this reply I will highlight points of accountability across the children and health portfolios I will present the Government's 10-day scorecard on transparency and finally I will show how we have hit the ground running and sharpened an accountability tool in a way that I don't think this Government has fully appreciated.I will start with health and warn this Government up front here is the headline coming towards them in three words: save our DHBs. One of the sentinel actions that this Government has committed to is a blinded commitment to consolidate our DHBs. When DHBs are merged the local voice is diminished. This has been done before and while reinventing the wheel can sometimes bring back the best it usually reinvents the bad. Those of us who have worked under Regional Health Authorities will remember how consolidation tramples the voice of the regions which are simply lost in the challenges of big cities. The DHBs we are concerned for include Northland Lakes Tairāwhiti Taranaki Hawke's Bay Whanganui Wairarapa Nelson Marlborough West Coast and South Canterbury. We challenge the Government then to answer the following six questions. Will Northland lose its DHB and be merged with Waitematā? Will Lakes lose its DHB and be merged with Waikato? Will Tairāwhiti lose its DHB and be merged with Bay of Plenty and Hawke's Bay? Will Taranaki Whanganui and MidCentral all lose their localness and be merged as one entity? Will Wairarapa lose its DHB and be merged with the Hutt? Finally will Nelson Marlborough West Coast and South Canterbury all lose their DHBs in a merger with Canterbury? Which DHBs will go? Here is the challenge to Labour MPs in these regions: good luck explaining to your constituents why a Labour Government is taking their DHBs. We heard backbench Labour MPs stand on the campaign trail and offer bold promises around how they will fight for their DHB. Well watch the arrogant machinery of a second-term Labour Government trample your feigned and naive backbench resistance as you are whipped to a new-found evangelism for centralisation and control. Mark my words the spin will be "better access to specialist services" and "a sustainable health system" which is all code for less and less. Why would we have faith in the ability of this Government to undertake such change when over three years managing health they have indeed spent more but delivered less?My final word on DHBs is to reflect not only the DHBs that will go but the mega-DHBs that will be created and ask how nimble and flexible can a mega-DHB be? How many jobs will be lost? How much money will be spent on new layers of bureaucracy? Well we can actually model the answer with a similar experiment in the tertiary sector from this Government that has removed industry training organisations moved apprentices back to polytechnics and formed one mega-polytechnic. Can we expect the same with mega-DHBs? Will there be at least 11 new chief executives $267 million in new cost in a single management layer and official advice ignored when it states reform is unlikely to achieve the desired goals with extreme impact. Can we expect the new health Minister to bring the same experience from the Ngāpuhi Treaty settlement where he came in as the new broom spent a lot of money broke relationships swept away years of work on Maranga Mai and then left Ngāpuhi worse off and without a mandate? Is that what we can expect in health? Here again is the forewarning: save our DHBs.I want to speak to a new portfolio responsibility: children and specifically child poverty. No bold child poverty claims in the Speech from the Throne this time. No targets no numbers just a weak slogan that in the area of child poverty "The Government will be guided by its values." No one even knows what that means. And so different from the first three years when there were numbers and targets. On 5 September 2017 the incoming Labour Government said "We will lift 100000 children out of poverty." But in February this year their media release was 14800—a long way from the 100000—a broken promise to children. Three independent reports this year and three failures for a Labour Government with the tools of office and big promises. Their target is: 2021 10.3 percent of houses in material deprivation. That's the target that we're watching: 10.3 percent.I'll turn now to the 10-day transparency scorecard I alluded to earlier. Note also: no big statements from the throne today about an open and transparent Government—nothing here today. I'll sample transparency as an example of how focused we are to be an effective Opposition. The day after the election we hit the ground running. There was work to do because on Sunday the 18th at 1 p.m. surprisingly there was another community coronavirus case. So we got to work. Using the tools we have we swung into action and from 17 October to 27 October we generated more than 20 Official Information Act requests (OIAs). I will speak to 10 of those that I have some visibility on. All 10 OIAs generated in the first 10 days of this Government were to be answered by yesterday. Here then is the 10-day transparency scorecard for this Government's response to OIA requests. As of yesterday only one of the 10 requests had been successfully completed in time without extensions or transfers 40 percent—nearly half—were overdue 30 percent had been extended with very short notice. In the first 10 days of this Government then the performance for transparency using OIA requests as a proxy is a miserable 10 percent. Is this a 10 percent Government? Is that what their targets will be—10 percent of what they're saying?We've gone even further as an Opposition and improved some of the tools of transparency that we have. Failures in this Government's approach to proactive releases were brought into focus for me almost exactly this time last year when the damning Tuia 250 data breach report was reported in a proactive media release 24 hours after Parliament had risen for Christmas recess. As a consequence of this I met with the Chief Ombudsman earlier this year—concerns and suggestions which were subsequently incorporated into the release of the document "Proactive release: Good practices and proactive release of official information". Let me enlighten the Government on how we will bind them. No longer will they be able to frustrate the OIA process like they did in Tuia 250 by hiding behind a future proactive release on an unknown date and with answers hidden in a massive data dump. There are now three elements to a code of practice. The OIA request is to be given the date their OIA will be acknowledged in a proactive release. They are to be told the date that that release is made and it is to be indicated where the information they are looking for is in that proactive release. We have hit the ground running. We have sharpened the tools.In summary this Government is unfettered and with clear lines of accountability. If they perform well then all of the credit is theirs and theirs alone. But if they perform poorly then they will own every single part of that failure. We as an Opposition are the safety net in the new thinking—a safety net to temper the excesses of ideology and the recklessness of spending a source of new thinking that pushes policy past the inherent instinct of Government officials to manage risk. We will seek to reduce damage and harm to talk policy to power and to leave our fingerprints on those actions that lift our collective safety security and concept of a good life. In no small part then we remain in the service of New Zealanders. Thank you.DEPUTY SPEAKER: I call the Hon Carmel Sepuloni although I'll just let the House know that I will be exercising the new Standing Order where the presiding officer has the discretion to extend past 5 p.m. The Hon Carmel Sepuloni."