Clark DavidHon Dr DAVID CLARK (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): I will speak shortly about the importance of recovery in the COVID-19 effort but I do need to address a couple of points raised by the previous member. I do find it a little disappointing that he seeks to politicise so many aspects of the mental health system when he accuses others of politicising and says it should be politics free. I agree with him that we need aspiration. We need to better support into the future the lives of those who are struggling with mental health challenges. There is no doubt about that. But where he says that we have raised the expectations through coming into Government he is right. We have accepted as a Government that this is a challenge that needed addressing. If we go back to the previous Government at the end of their time they were simply not open to even reviewing mental health. There was a crisis. There was a crisis and the whole sector was calling for a review. Labour and other parties that joined the coalition Government listened to New Zealanders and instigated a review and the result was He Ara Oranga. Now from that review subsequently a budget has put aside a record amount of money for mental health—unprecedented in New Zealand history. This is the first Government to take mental health seriously and Andrew Little as Minister is driving that forward. Now he is overseeing the rebuild of significant facilities around the country. The member Matt Doocey in his contribution raised the facility in Counties Manukau and said that took three years to build. What he didn't mention was that before the build phase comes a good deal of planning with all of these facilities. And what he also failed to mention was that under the previous Governments under the National Government they had stopped planning for new facilities. They had been told it's not worth it. They had stripped out of the legislation the requirement to plan for the future and the Ministers had told them Do not plan for the future because you will not get funding for your mental health facilities." Some of those buildings had faeces in the walls! I mean this is the state of some of the health buildings across the system when they left office. It is a disgrace that they now come to this House and try to lecture us on the speed of the change given that they had given up and they had caused everyone to give up hope. We will not apologise for starting to make that change on this side of the House. I back Andrew Little and the good work that he is doing overseeing that programme training up hundreds more people to work at the front line in support of those wrestling with mental health challenges. He has given some of those figures today. Tens of thousands of sessions at the front line because He Ara Oranga identified the needs of those people who were not able to get services for mild to moderate and were ending up at the acute level of our system. The Government acted and the Government is training people and making sure that we are working with the community to improve our systems for the future.In the remaining period I have here I do want to talk about addressing those immediate needs. We are doing it as Government across the board not just in health. Of course in the COVID recovery right now we have extra clinics going out to do testing across Wellington. We have a vaccination programme being rolled out. There is an immense amount of spending going on to keep people safe. But we've found throughout the COVID period that the best health response is also the best economic response. And we've seen Standard & Poor's come back and give the first upgrade for any Western country for credit rating to New Zealand—the first for any OECD country—the first credit upgrade post-COVID to New Zealand. The first upgrade New Zealand's had since 2003. That is recognition of the fine stewardship of our Minister of Finance Grant Robertson.We are making the right choices around making sure we're investing now in the health response but we're also planning for the longer term to make sure we're addressing the challenges of climate change of inequality child poverty housing and so on. These are long-term challenges we've inherited as a Government but we are determined to build back better: $57 billion in infrastructure over the next five years. These are ambitious plans but we make no apology for tackling those long-term challenges we've inherited from a Government prior to us that simply put its head in the sand. We are determined to make a meaningful difference to build back better."