Woodhouse Michael: General DebateText is subject to correctionWoodhouse Michael: General Debate[Sitting date: 17 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4492. Text is subject to correction.]Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister of Immigration):One of the more challenging aspects of delivering better public services for New Zealand is that from time to time Governments need to make really tough decisions and today has been one of those days. I want to applaud Dr Coleman our Minister of Health for the difficult decision that he has made to appoint commissioners to the Southern District Health Board an organisation that I know very well having worked there albeit it quite some time ago. I want to start my intervention by applauding those many thousands of hard-working staff of the Southern District Health Board the regional hospitals and the contractors to the delivery of health services in the south because they do a fantastic job for our people but there is a problem. There is a problem of financial viability that as the Minister said is very longstanding. During the period from my last year at Dunedin Hospital in 1996 until my first year as a member of Parliament the combined deficits of the Otago District Health Board were around $144 million. That sounds quite challenging in and of itself but the budgeted deficits during that period were only half that. What has frustrated successive Ministers on both sides of the House is that successive returns to viability plans have been tabled and not adhered to. So what is really important now is that there be a circuit breaker and I think that is what the appointment of commissioners will do.I was very pleased albeit not surprised to note the Minister of Health’s commitment to the rebuilding of the clinical services block and the hospital in the foreseeable future. What is very important however is that those decisions on the configuration and the timing of the rebuild are matters for clinicians and health building designers not politicians. I counsel Dr Clark whose advocacy I admire—I have no problem with that—against the political rhetoric around the rebuilding of that hospital which as I know from experience is a very very complex process.I want to defend and applaud this Government’s response to the support for the Southern District Health Board. In the best of times when the so-called surpluses were many and plentiful Labour did nothing about Dunedin Hospital. It built a Chinese garden but it cannot rebuild a hospital. The previous Minister of Health and current spokesman on health in Labour has heavily criticised the fact that the windows in the operating theatre are leaking. Well I have got news for Mrs King. They have been doing that for years and she ignored it when Labour had an excellent opportunity. Then when finances were tight and this Government had straitened times the commitment to all of our district health boards and in particular the southern one was maintained. The results are emphatic: a 30 percent increase in elective surgery throughput and reductions in waiting times for cancer treatment and emergency department.The worst part of Dunedin Hospital was the neonatal intensive care unit which my youngest daughter spent some time in after she was born. I cannot believe the patience and good grace with which those workers spent years in terribly cramped and overcrowded conditions. It was this Government that rebuilt the neonatal intensive care unit the children’s ward and the acute mental health ward at Wakari Hospital. That is commitment. That is making sure that health services are maintained in straitened times and despite the financial challenges that the district health board faces.I want to wish the very best for the commissioners all three of whom I know very well. Kathy Grant Graham Crombie and Richard Thomson have a mountain of work to do and it is encouraging to me to know that the community is behind them and will wish them all the best as they go on that path to viability. Yes there are discussions about population-based funding formulas and regional rural adjustors and things like that but the simple fact is and we in the south should know this better than anybody—those canny Scottish settlers have given that ethos of cutting our cloth to meet the need. We fix those problems not by ignoring the financial constraints that are set for the community. We live within those constraints and we make sure that we extract every ounce of value from every dollar allocated to the Southern District Health Board. That is the responsible thing to do that is what the commissioners will do and that is what I wish them all the very best in achieving.