O'Connor Simon: Radiation Safety Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Simon: Radiation Safety Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 03 November 2015. Volume:709;Page:7638. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I am pleased to take a call in this second reading of the Radiation Safety Bill. Can I begin by acknowledging the speaker who has just sat down Annette King but also other members of the Health Committee. I have often said that we are quite collegial in our proceedings and I think this bill is a good example of working together. Perhaps there was a point of commonality—and certainly with regard to me—of complete and utter lack of knowledge in this space. I am not an electrical engineer physicist or anything so—Stuart Nash: Or anything at all.SIMON O’CONNOR: Oh that hurts—that hurts.Stuart Nash: You said it.SIMON O’CONNOR: I know. It is just so hurtful really. You know we work very well together in this space because actually it was as both previous speakers have mentioned a very very technical piece of legislation. I too want to thank the officials who led us through that articulating these concepts so that lay people could understand and at times I suspect displaying great patience as we continued to ask the same questions over and over as we tried to get our heads around them. But I think for those listening to understand that although lay people might sit on this committee we work very hard to understand the concepts that we are ultimately putting into law. So my thanks go to the officials and my thanks go to the committee.One of the things that keeps coming up and that I want to assure the public about is again that distinction between ionising and non-ionising radiation. I think often when there is a little bit of uncertainty in these spaces it generates a lot of concern for people. Look this bill deals with ionising radiation. As the Hon Annette King mentioned we are dealing with things like gamma rays beta rays X-rays and so forth. It is energies or particles of energies that make material and substantial differences and that is distinctly different in a physical sense from what you would expect from visible light sources ultraviolet light radio waves what is coming out of your cellphone at the moment TV screens and the like. We are not in this bill wanting to regulate the latter.There is one that is not so much an exception but I recall that one submitter—in fact the first gentleman who submitted—pointed out the issue of smoke detectors and where they fit. In fact that was something that we have very quickly looked at and come to the right space in that area. Those of you who may you know take the time walking through the corridors of your house will note that actually we are using ionising radiation in that space so how we deal with that appropriately is important.As has also been mentioned this is about bringing the legislation up to speed with current practice. I have to admit I was not around in 1965. I will have to turn to some older members—I will not mention which party—[Interruption] I know—experience. But we are also bringing ourselves towards those international obligations.Andrew Bayly: You were born then?SIMON O’CONNOR: No look the milkman had not even turned down the street in 1965. That said I was born in an era where we still had black and white television and only two channels. We are also here to bring ourselves in line with international obligations and that is quite important.A couple of things I think we need to very quickly touch on—this bill ensures that appropriate security measures are in place when handling radiation. This is not opening the door to some sort of carte blanche approach. It is also about setting codes of practice that will ultimately guide the way we deal with radiation and those codes have to be renewed or reviewed every 5 years. One really important element is that an institution now using ionising radiation needs a single source licence. So the Minister talked about district health boards where they might of course have an X-ray machine a CT scanning machine magnetic resonance imaging and so forth. We are not expecting the district health boards to hold a licence for each of those items; they themselves can hold a source licence to be able to use ionising radiation and very much the same is true for universities.The other thing I will touch on because there are a lot of technical changes we have made is about ancillary services. So you might have a magnetic resonance imaging machine and there is a source licence obviously to use it but you may need at times to send parts overseas in particular to get the ancillary or support services. In the original drafting of the bill it looked like we might have to regulate or provide some sort of approval for people outside New Zealand to actually help support the work of those magnetic resonance imaging machines. We have decided that does not really make much sense practically speaking so we have tightened up the regulations to make it very clear that the source licence will also enable people to use ancillary services overseas to help with those machines.There are a few exceptions around our Defence Force and itsuse of radiation as well—I think that is important to note. But look overall this is a very good bill. I thank members again for their overarching support and look forward to it moving to Committee stage.