Verrall AyeshaHon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well Labour supports this bill but I would just like to put on record some of the work that Labour's done to improve the management of winter ailments over the last several years because I thought the remarks of the previous speaker the Hon David Seymour were perhaps casting far too negative a gloss on the availability of effective medicines for winter ailments in New Zealand. And I would like to the member that that Government on the other side of the House has reduced the access to the flu vaccine this winter for New Zealanders which is a shame because that actually prevents winter illnesses unlike one that just treats the symptoms. I'd also like to remind that member of the extensive work done by the last Government to increase the role of pharmacies in providing medicines and treatments over winter. We in the Labour Party support the opportunities for New Zealanders to have greater access to medicines and that's why we will be voting for this bill.But I also think it is worth noting in this third reading some of the concerns that we have about it which we have sought to raise throughout the truncated process this bill has had through the House. We have had a shortened select committee process with only approximately a week for submitters to submit and a very short period of hearings. We also heard from Ministry of Health officials that advice from pharmacists on how this would be implemented in the real world was only really from a handful of pharmacy representatives. So it is worth bearing that in mind when we consider the reassurances of the Associate Minister of Health (Pharmac) on the safety of this approach.I feel the risks that we have raised have not been taken seriously. I guess at one level it comes down to a disagreement on the economic framing that the Minister put. Fundamentally while it might be that rational actors in the drug market can secure cheaper methamphetamine from overseas suppliers—well I can tell you one reality from working in the health system is that drugs make you act irrationally. And that is the is the challenge—that there will be desperate people who will now have a new opportunity for how to procure meth via cooking it from P and we have introduced a new risk for addiction into our community.Now we are not puritans about this. There would be safe ways to mitigate that and unfortunately our proposals for those mitigations have not been taken seriously. I'm particularly disappointed that the proposal that pseudoephedrine be treated like codeine and be required to be kept in a locked safe in pharmacies has not made its way into the bill in its final form. At the Health Committee we also discussed multiple other mitigations: the importance of providing treatment for meth addiction and scaling up those services the importance of improving treatment pathways for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) because many people who have untreated ADHD may find their way into illicit drug use as well and also the opportunity to improve monitoring of sales so that there could be faster recognition and investigation of people doing so-called smurfing where they go shop around to get pseudoephedrine from multiple different stores so that they can then cook up methamphetamine.So these are the risks that we have identified. We as the Labour Party believe that we have proposed pragmatic solutions to mitigate these risks. The Government could have had the benefit of a more fulsome select committee process it could have shown greater respect to the concerns that were raised. Instead at committee stage the Minister described these proposals as paralysis by analysis." I suppose he's got no one to blame but himself if some of these risks eventuate."