Verrall AyeshaHon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Labour): Madam Speaker fire up your DeLorean. We're going back to the future" back to the Medicines Act 1981 because what this Government proposes to do today is to repeal the Therapeutic Products Act.The Therapeutic Products Act has been worked for for 15 years by officials in New Zealand across three different Governments and what it sought to do was to modernise medical regulation in New Zealand. Let me name some of the treatments that have come into existence since the Medicines Act 1981: immunotherapy mRNA vaccines minimally invasive surgery chimeric antigen receptor t-cells gene therapies 3D printing implantable devices—all of these modern technologies that some on that side of the House say they're desperate to spend money getting but they are now abandoning a form of regulation for it.Those products need to be appropriately regulated. Let me tell you why: because when you do not regulate them people get hurt. I want to tell you about the people I have looked after with implantable devices that have had defects—that have started to rot their way out of their body—because they are not properly regulated. Think about the women who had been harmed by surgical mesh in this country who we do not have a system for going back and finding out where particular devices were used and then going and telling those women that actually there's a problem with the device. That is what the Therapeutic Products Act did and that's what this Government is repealing.I don't know if in this short time I have the ability to go through the errors that were in the Minister's speech but here's a few. The first was that the Minister said that there was a single form of regulation in the Therapeutic Products Act. Absolutely not true: medicines are regulated differently from devices are regulated differently from natural health products are regulated differently in some ways from rongoā. There is also a lack of clarity in the Minister's remarks about how the bill was actually to be implemented. There is less clarity for industry now when they had the opportunity to work through how regulations were to be brought into place because now it's apparent that the Government doesn't have a plan at all.We're going back to there being no regulation. In fact it's less clear for industry. It seems to me that this Government can't agree on how it's going to take this forward because if they could they'd just bring an amendment. They'd bring an amendment they'd change things about medical devices perhaps because I agree—I accept though I do not agree—that members on the other side of the House might have a different view on regulation from that that we do. But if they had a view they would make an amendment.Instead they're removing all the options of regulation and as the Minister confessed they don't want to spend the spend the cost of making the secondary regulation. So what happens as medical technology continues to advance? What happens when new products enter the market? Well there's no way—there's no way—for medical devices other than being listed on one website by the Ministry of Health. There is no other protections around them. There is no regulation. That's what we found out during the pandemic—there was no regulation of rapid antigen tests.I also want to remind new members of the House what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. We did not have a way of enabling the vaccine roll-out because we have no way of having emergency authorisation options in the Medicines Act 1981 so we had to pass retrospective legislation in this House in order to be able to have the vaccine roll-out. So none of the lessons learnt from COVID-19 are incorporated into the Medicines Act 1981. That's why when there was a monkeypox outbreak in Auckland we also had to run that vaccine roll-out without publicising it because there was no opportunity to have public health emergencies responded to in this Act.I have stood by too many New Zealanders' bedsides when they have been hurt by products that are inadequately regulated. The Therapeutic Products Act sought to prevent some of this harm. This Government is taking New Zealand backwards."