O'Connor SimonSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Thank you very much Madam Chair. Appreciate the call. As a heads-up as a courtesy to the committee I want to address two Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) in my name—hope that I get these ones right; once again I lost my glasses—SOP 378—Hon Clare Curran: You can borrow mine. SIMON O'CONNOR: —that's a proposed amendment to SOP 259—once again I do thank the kind offer—and SOP 369. I hope that will ensure relevancy as we continue to dissect this bill. The first one that being SOP 378 as I say is an amendment to SOP 259. What this is suggesting is that what is currently as clause 27(1)—to replace what is currently defined as a medical practitioner nurse practitioner or psychiatrist" with "Any person". What I am positing here to the committee is that is far too narrow when it comes to the case of who's actually committing an offence or particularly speaking wilfully failing to comply. So at the moment when we think of the range of people who are involved with assisted suicide or euthanasia there is a multiplicity of people involved: obviously doctors obviously nurses nurse practitioners psychiatrists. Those are three and that's spelt out in SOP 259. My issue fundamentally and first and foremost is actually there are more than those three categories of persons who are involved with assisted suicide and euthanasia. Psychologists may still be involved. They may not be the prescribed individuals but a psychologist will still be involved. Nurses will still be involved. In fact it's fairly common practice that nurses are assisting with dying when one looks at overseas jurisdictions and importantly as I've pointed out to the House before there's only about 300 nurse practitioners in the country. So we are instantly limiting a whole array of people who may for one reason or another be involved with assisted suicide and euthanasia from no longer being able to be held to account as wilfully failing to comply with the legislation. To further illustrate the point this also excludes pharmacists. So a pharmacist is not mentioned on SOP 259 in clause 27(1) in Part 4. So a pharmacist who does not comply with the correct procedures around providing lethal doses of drugs will not be captured as someone who's actually wilfully committing an offence. That I would suggest to the committee is a bit of a problem. Without banging on my usual mantra but I will because I've just indicated I would this is again an example of sloppiness absolute sloppiness in the legal drafting. We know in this House that when we make mistakes we always have to come back and fix it and in this case a we create ourselves more work and b we kill people. So it's too too narrow. The other point which comes out of SOP 378 is to make sure we don't end up with a rather strange and perverse situation where someone may inadvertently or intentionally commit an offence. Again they are wilfully if you will failing to comply because they themselves haven't brought them under the current jurisdiction of a medical practitioner nurse practitioner or psychiatrist. In other words someone you could argue acting in good faith—I think Simeon Brown touched on it—acts in good faith does not comply with the rules and there are copious rules round and round in circles in this bill. But if they don't wilfully comply they can only be held to account as the legislation is currently written if they're a medical practitioner a nurse practitioner or a psychiatrist. So for the sake of the committee figure out a situation if I might phrase it that way where a doctor has not actually completed their registration. They haven't completed their registration. So all of a sudden they are no longer as it is currently written in SOP 259 a medical practitioner. So they may have wilfully failed to comply but they have no longer actually got their practising certificate. It's a small opportunity. It's an odd opportunity but as the drafting is currently they would not actually be able to—[Time expired]"