Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Associate Health Minister David Seymour has admitted not working on the cancer medicines policy until after the Budget, and he was not aware of it being worked on elsewhere in government until then either.
With Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on personal leave and deputy Winston Peters overseas, Seymour - the ACT Party leader - is acting prime minister and spoke to reporters in the afternoon, celebrating a drop in inflation.
He had announced the previous day a shift in Pharmac's approach, having sent a new letter of expectations to the drug-buying agency.
He told reporters the next Budget would also be very tight.
"Not up to me to say a lot more about that but there's a very clear impetus that we have $2.4 billion to work with, over a billion of that's already committed. There's always going to be surprises such as the uplift in Pharmac expenditure that we saw last month."
Asked if he had done any work on the commitment before the Budget, he said "as the minister responsible for Pharmac? Ah, no, no I didn't".
He was asked if he had been aware of work being done on the commitment by other parts of the government ahead of the Budget.
"We were very focused on the fact that we were left with an almost $2b hole in the medicines Budget and faced the prospect of medicines being cancelled," he said.
"I'm not aware that the government was. Myself, I was well aware that we had a commitment and I focused on filling in the significant fiscal hole that we faced."
He said whether the government had scrambled to fix the broken promise was a "reading that some people could put on it" but he would instead view it as delivering a huge number of medicines to people in need.
The funding boost for Pharmac in June came as a way of meeting National's pre-election policy of funding 13 specific cancer drugs. Doing so could have compromised Pharmac's independence and ability to bargain for cheaper drugs, however, so it ended up being a $604m increase over four years to cover up to 54 new medicines including 26 cancer treatments.
Facing a backlash from cancer patients and advocates over not having included the drugs in the Budget, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had - the week after the Budget - said the government would keep the cancer drugs promise and work had been under way for weeks.
"What we're working on is actually how we procure, those procurement processes are quite complex," Luxon said in early June. "We've been working through a series of options even over the last six to eight weeks."
He said they would provide the funding "certainly this year". The funding - from next year's Budget - was announced on the 24th.