"ACT is celebrating the Health Minister's intervention to ensure free GP and nurse services in Hawke's Bay are targeted according to need, not race," says ACT Health spokesperson Todd Stephenson.

"We raised the alarm last week that Health NZ's decision to target free local services to Māori and Pacific would see patients in greater need miss out purely because they have the wrong ancestry.

"ACT has long argued that all New Zealanders deserve the same basic respect and dignity as humans, and that includes having government agencies treat us as individuals, with our own challenges and needs – not as members of an ethnicity.

"The Health Minister's swift intervention ought to send a strong message to the rest of the public service that targeting government services based on race is lazy and divisive.

"Regardless, ACT's coalition agreement commits that every central government organisation will recieve a Cabinet Office circular confirming that it is the Government’s expectation that public services should be prioritised on the basis of need, not race."

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