The government has announced free cervical screening for all women aged 25 to 69 from March next year – a policy Labour promised last year which was criticised by Act, writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

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Yesterday, the government announced that cervical screening will be free for all women aged 25 to 69 from 1 March 2027, 1News reported. Health minister Simeon Brown said the change would benefit an estimated 786,000 additional women and was a key step towards eliminating cervical cancer. “Cervical cancer is a cancer we can eliminate,” he said. “We have the tools to be able to do that with its vaccination, screening and treatment.”

Currently, screening is free only for Māori and Pacific women, Community Services Card holders, and those who have never been screened or are overdue. For others, the cost can range from $35 to more than $100, which Cancer Society chief executive Nicola Coom said could be a barrier: “For some women, that’s the choice between the children have school lunches for the week or I have a self-test for cervical cancer”.

Whose policy is it anyway?

In November last year, Labour promised free cervical screening from October 2027 as part of its Medicard scheme, 1News reported at the time. Labour’s health spokesperson Dr Ayesha Verrall said at the time the move would help prevent cancers and avoid costly hospital treatments. Somewhat awkwardly from today’s vantage point (more on that below), Act’s health spokesperson Todd Stephenson criticised Labour’s policy, calling it “untargeted” and argued the money would be better spent elsewhere.

This morning, RNZ’s Mary Argue reported that Labour’s Verrall celebrated yesterday’s announcement while not being shy to take credit. “I am not at all worried about having one of our policies adopted by the government, it’s a great idea. It was work I started when I was minister. The important thing is that women get access to this service.”

But minister for women Nicola Grigg rejected the idea the government had copied Labour’s policy, telling RNZ she had been pushing for free screening for years and noted the previous Labour government had the opportunity to introduce it but didn’t. “We’ve come into government and we’re going to get it done.”

Either way, it’s ‘a good day for women’

Health advocates have welcomed the announcement. Cervical cancer survivor Jen Jewell told 1News she felt “very lucky” her life circumstances had put her in a position to catch the cancer early. “Making the test free will hopefully mean it becomes more routine, and less scary,” she said.

Grigg also released the government’s Cervical Cancer Elimination Plan, which aims to reduce cervical cancer to fewer than four cases per 100,000 women a year across every population group by 2040. “Today is a good day for women,” she said. “But screening only saves lives if it’s taken up.”

System issues

The announcement comes while the cervical screening programme itself is under scrutiny. Two weeks ago, Stuff’s Nicholas Jones reported that a woman was only told her cancer test couldn’t be processed two years after she took it. The letter from the national cervical screening programme was dated July 2026 and told her that her test, taken in July 2024, “was not able to be processed.” It advised her to contact her healthcare provider to book another.

Health NZ told Stuff it would investigate her case but said no connection had been found with wider problems with the cervical screening register. Those problems were outlined in a 117-page report released the week before, which found the register was “not initiating contact with all eligible people about screening due to the way it was designed as well as unintentional flaws in the way it was built”.