Clark DavidHon Dr DAVID CLARK (Minister of Health): I do want to address a couple of those spurious inaccuracies raised by the previous member the Hon Michael Woodhouse. It is somewhat laughable that he raises the issue of governance and performance at Waikato and suggests that the big problems have emerged in the 20 months that this Government has been here. I think that he would do well to recall that during the previous Government's tenure Dr Nigel Murray was the chief executive there who was subsequently interviewed and pursued by the Serious Fraud Office. His tenure was from I am told July 2014 until October 2017—very much the responsibility of the previous Government and very much I think history will show responsible for some inopportune and unwise investments in technology for some flagrantly inappropriate spending and for a culture at the district health board (DHB) at senior management level which was distinctly unhappy around that time and following his departure. And of course on top of that the $2.4 billion that that previous Government stripped out of the health system has had a deleterious effect across the whole health system.In that I will agree with the member: that indeed across the system there are challenges and that results from that decade of underfunding under the previous Government's watch. It has meant that our health providers our doctors our nurses and our allied health workers have been stretched and strained for far too long. I want to salute them. I want to thank them for their service under the previous Government's watch even though every day they had to turn up to an underfunded stressed health system to provide care often by going the extra mile themselves outside of their regular hours. So I do want to put on record my thanks to them.The member asks around intervention at other DHBs. Certainly this is a Government not afraid to intervene where there is poor performance. We have put in place Crown monitors first and foremost in Counties Manukau and also in the Waikato and then that led on to the commissioner appointment in the Waikato that we are discussing today. We have also put in place recently a Crown monitor in Canterbury to seek some clarity around their worsening financial position. They certainly have provided excellent clinical care I want to acknowledge in response to the terror attacks and also in response to the prior earthquakes. But we do need to get clarity around their situation—how much of it results from those situations and how much is from other matters—so that we have a clear picture into the future.DHBs under this Government have returned—some of them have returned balanced budgets. We can see that DHBs can return small surpluses small deficits. I certainly as Minister don't accept that big deficits are a necessity for operating DHBs especially when we are funding them this time around in record amounts. We are expecting improved performance from our DHBs and we will continue to invest. We make no apologies for addressing that decade of underfunding under the previous Government but nobody believes and nobody expects that we can address a decade of underfunding in one or two Budgets. It's simply problematic to very quickly address the workforce issues that have been created. Dr Reti raised the issue of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists talking about the crisis of senior medical health staff at Waikato. Well I can assure Dr Reti—and I know that the Hon Michael Woodhouse also knows that senior surgeons are not trained in 20 months and can't be trained in the 20 months that I've been health Minister; they take more than a decade to train. If there's anybody who's responsible for the lack of senior clinical staff in our hospitals it is the previous Government. So they wear that criticism fair and square—an issue they raised and one that they need to look at themselves in the mirror and come to peace with because we are certainly a Government committed to investing more. We will invest more. We are addressing the crisis in mental health. We will continue to invest in our DHBs because we believe in the public provision of health services on this side of the House. We won't see our system continue to run down like it did under nine long years of National.Part 1 agreed to.