Willis said an announcement was coming “shortly” and National intended to deliver on its promise, but pointed to the complicated processes around approving and procuring drugs – decisions usually made by Pharmac.
“There is some complexity to how those medicines are approved, how they are procured and the order in which that happens.
“I note there is no other political party that is prepared to make that commitment. We made that commitment and we intend to deliver on it.”
She said there were ways to override Pharmac’s decision-making process without up-ending the system and a solution to that was being worked out.
Willis said one reason it was not in the Budget was because of the $1.8 billion needed to ensure Pharmac could continue to offer the treatments it already funded, saying it was needed to “fill funding holes left by the former Labour Government”.
The issue has dogged the Government since the Budget was delivered last Thursday.
A Taxpayers’ Union Curia snap poll taken immediately after the Budget showed respondents thought the Budget’s contents were “okay” and most people were content with the size of the tax cuts offered. Those tax cuts were passed into law under urgency late last week.
However, there was a weekend of criticism for not including National’s election campaign promise to fund 13 cancer drugs in the Budget.
Hipkins said National should never have promised specific drugs to start with, but once it had it should have delivered on them.
“Being that specific in terms of what drugs should and shouldn’t be funded, I don’t think politicians should be doing that in an election campaign, I think it’s wrong,” he said.
“They do this in other countries and then it becomes really ripe for the pharmaceutical lobby to get in and the criteria for access to life-saving medications becomes more than just the scientific and medical criteria, it becomes political access and all those sorts of things, and who can run the best PR campaign.”
He said as soon as National named the drugs, it had lost its negotiating power.
The spending cuts the Government made to pay for the tax cuts have also faced criticism. Yesterday, the PSA announced it was filing legal proceedings against the Ministry of Education in relation to the job cuts at the ministry.
In a statement, the PSA claimed the ministry had not complied with the condition in the collective agreement that it do everything possible to redeploy laid-off staff.
Labour’s housing spokesman Kieran McAnulty also challenged the Government for its public housing moves, saying he had found $1.5b in cuts.
“There is $1.5 billion less for building and maintaining public houses, which will slow the progress we’ve made as a country to fix the housing crisis. The Government has cut $435 million from the Kāinga Ora house build programme and over $1b from the maintenance fund,” McAnulty said.
“The National Party did this last time. Public houses got so run-down that a big investment was needed to do them up, and instead of fronting up what was needed, they sold the houses off instead.”
Willis defended that, saying Kāinga Ora needed to be more efficient. The Budget had funding for about 1500 new houses to be built by community housing providers such as Habitat for Humanity and the Salvation Army, and she was confident that boosting infrastructure would also increase housing from private developers.
Willis also defended the decision to offer tax cuts in response to a question from the audience about whether they were needed. Willis noted that she was talking to a fairly wealthy audience, for whom $20 to $40 a fortnight might not make much of a difference.
“But come with me and talk to the people I met on the campaign who said that it would be the difference between being able to pay the bills and going into overdraft.”
She said the target was middle-income workers who were now paying a lot more tax as a proportion of their income than they had been because of bracket creep.
Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
