Delahunty Catherine: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: General Debate[Sitting date: 06 November 2013. Volume:694;Page:14416. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I would just like to start my speech today with a mihi to a great New Zealander whose anniversary of passing is today and that is Mr Rod Donald. The Green Party owes Rod Donald a deep debt of gratitude as does the country. Indeed without the work of Rod Donald and others we would not have MMP and many of us would not have the opportunity to represent the real constituencies that need to be represented in this House. Rod was an extraordinary man an extraordinary contributor and he helped the Green Party become the positive visionary grounded and successful party that we are now. I think that if he was with us today he would be proud to see that we have become a strong and positive force in New Zealand politics with a great future ahead of us and with a clear transformative idea of where we need to go.This week there is more good news as the National Government likes to say but this time it is good. This week we had another Green success and that success related to an interesting story. All the MPs in Parliament about 6 months ago received this little gift which was a type of health product for handwashing. I read the label and on the label I found a chemical that is very very dangerous to human health and to the environment. To its credit when I challenged the company that sent us this gift Health Basics and said that this chemical triclosan is a risk to human health and the environment it withdrew the chemical. That was an incredibly positive thing to do. The company has also looked at its other products in terms of making them safer. So today I am celebrating the opportunity that that company has taken up of listening to the Green Party when we said that our health and the environment should not just be “greenwashing” but must be made real.However we cannot do that product by product and company by company. Much as I applaud Health Basics which did this—this excellent work by Health Basics—there are over 150000 chemicals yet to be identified but thought by the World Health Organization to be endocrine disruptors which is what triclosan is. These products are in our toothpastes our underarm deodorants and many of our antibacterial soaps. For the citizen who is reading the label and finding these chemicals that actually create endocrine disruption affect muscle performance are deadly to aquatic life and in chlorinated sewage water turn into dioxin from this one product triclosan—we cannot expect the citizens to know this.So there is a role for the regulator and my challenge today is to the Minister for the Environment. Instead of having the Environmental Protection Authority laboriously requiring citizens to prove that chemicals are unsafe or me as an MP who just happened to know about this and to find the company and challenge it it would be excellent if the Minister for the Environment stepped up on this issue and changed the Environmental Protection Authority model for assessing chemicals. I have asked the Minister and the chief executive officer of the Environmental Protection Authority to reassess triclosan immediately—we need it out of our products—but also to change the way in which all chemicals are assessed so that we follow the European modern model which is precautionary and which requires companies to prove safety not people who have been affected by chemicals or people like me who have concerns about individual chemicals to actually prove that they are dangerous.We need to change the burden of proof and this is something that I having asked the Minister and the Environmental Protection Authority to do am hoping they will listen to me about. We cannot keep talking just about safety in the workplace. The Minister introduced a very good programme and a bill is coming up around safety in the workplace with chemicals. But what about safety in our homes? There is nothing more precious than the way in which we treat our environment and the way in which we treat our bodies. If we do not take an opportunity like this one to clean up our chemical practices we will continue to have degraded waterways the creation of dioxin and people with health issues that are often creating hormone dysfunction.This is a very serious matter which I am delighted to say we managed to get some progress with this company on. It shows you that if people get the information and if the Government will provide a decent framework we can have healthy homes. But in the meantime there are thousands of chemicals out there in daily life—in our shampoos in our soaps in our underarm deodorants—that are directly going into our bodies and are disrupting our endocrine systems and causing health issues. We are not a healthy population and products are not necessarily safe until somebody raises the issue. We have a responsibility to make change.One of these issues that I have been working on for a long time is the issue of dioxin. It is terrifying to think that triclosan can create dioxin in our sewerage systems and wastewater simply by being washed down out of the household water and plumbing system. People do not know these things. We need to make change.