Pitched as ending the situation where New Zealanders missed out on cancer drugs funded overseas.

The Policy: National Cancer Medicine Fund — 2023 Election →

What it does:

• The money: a $604 million boost to Pharmac over four years, announced June 2024 — its biggest-ever increase (Pharmac).
• The benchmark: it sits on a base Combined Pharmaceutical Budget of about $1.31 billion in 2023/24 (which would otherwise have fallen back toward $1.13b as temporary top-ups expired), lifting the four-year medicines budget to roughly $6.3 billion (RNZ).
• What it funds: about 26 cancer medicines (plus others) across bowel, breast, lung, bladder, prostate and several blood cancers, with Keytruda funded for several cancers from 1 October 2024; Pharmac estimated the wider uplift would help around 175,000 New Zealanders.

The bigger picture — are we keeping up?

• The model: Pharmac runs a fixed budget and bargains hard, favouring generics and biosimilars to secure among the lowest prices in the world and reinvest the savings. It works well for off-patent generics.
• The trade-off: for new, patented medicines NZ lags. One report ranked NZ last of 20 comparable OECD countries for access to modern medicines and about twice as slow to fund them; Australia funded roughly 215 modern medicines to NZ's 86 (2011–2025), within ~18 months of registration versus NZ's ~3 years (NZ Herald, RNZ).
• Scale of spend: only about 5% of NZ's health budget goes on medicines, versus over 10% in Australia and the UK.
• What is reasonable: with about 5.3 million people Pharmac cannot fund everything, and its bargaining keeps the system affordable — the open question is whether the model keeps NZ current or structurally behind, especially on the novel medicines (the "uniques") where patients feel the gap most. Even the minister responsible, David Seymour, mostly agreed with the OECD-lag findings.

The result:

The $604m was committed and medicines rolled out from late 2024 — a kept, high-impact promise, with thousands now accessing drugs they previously self-funded or went without. But it is a large top-up on a long-underfunded, generics-first model: researchers warn that without sustained increases the gaps reopen as demand and prices rise (The Conversation). Verdict: a real win for cancer patients that does not, by itself, close NZ's structural gap on modern medicines.