Curran ClareHon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Fakaalofa lahi atu Mr Speaker. Today is Thank Your Cleaner Day and I actually want to thank all the cleaners and the cleaners in our Parliament particularly. I describe them as the invisible but essential workforce and they do deserve our thanks. What a bunch of negative Nellies. Hon Hon Member: Awful. Hon CLARE CURRAN: They are. I'm a bit fired up actually because there are attempts by the National Party—pretty concerted attempts—to trivialise and in fact negate the neglect that occurred under their watch. When you start reading articles in the paper that say  'Nine years of neglect'—oh no it's become a cliché" then you know that there's a concerted revisionist campaign under way and that's dirty politics actually. But the public deserve to know that when Government members talk about nine years of neglect they should be able to provide evidence so here's some evidence. In health no money and no plan to fix our rundown hospitals and for three of them Dunedin Hospital Middlemore Hospital and Taranaki Base Hospital—and there are many more—plans are already under way to fix them. No plan to tackle cancer—they scrapped the New Zealand cancer control agency. No new radiation machines. No action on mental health or addiction. They underfunded health by $2.3 billion—and in mental health for too long you had to reach crisis point before you could get any help. Young people were falling through the cracks support services were absolutely stretched and in 2014 the cost of neglect on serious mental illness was $12 billion or 5 percent of GDP. In education National let the costs creep up for parents. They didn't adequately plan for growth meaning that schools had to make do by using libraries and halls when their school rolls increased and there were critical skill shortages in polytechs and they were going broke. In housing we know that first-home buyers have been locked out of the market—the worst homelessness in the OECD. Families sleeping in cars—I'll go on and on—and in the environment rivers you can't swim in. In transport increased congestion. They invested 40 percent of the transport budget into hand-picked motorways that only carry 4 percent of vehicle journeys. So what have we done? What have we done? What are some of the things that we have done in those two years since? We've made huge investments in mental health so that people can get help starting with their local GP. More addiction treatment beds and services. New cancer treatment equipment like radiation machines. New cancer drugs. We've started to clean up our rivers—we've got so much to do in that area. We're supporting farmers to fence the waterways and plant trees and we've just passed legislation yesterday in the House to increase school funding so that parents don't have to pay for school donations or pay for NCEA fees. We're supporting businesses to invest in innovation and diversification. We're investing in trade training. We're banning offshore speculators stopping the sell-off of State houses building more public houses—and I think we heard today there were 2500 new public houses this year after nine years of neglect and that's only that evidence. There's much much more evidence than that but I don't have time to go into all of it. After nine years of neglect too many issues have been ignored and I say to the negative Nellies across the aisle stop talking down the economy and stop opposing everything. How about coming up with some of your new—not yours Mr Speaker—ideas? Come up with some new ideas. Our economy is in good shape. We know we've got big problems to tackle after nine years of neglect. We are tackling them. We know we can't do it all at once but we've made a damn good start."