Logie Jan: Health (Protection) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Health (Protection) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 27 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:4088. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): Fa‘afetai lava. I rise to take a call on this the second reading of the Health (Protection) Amendment Bill. It will be a relatively short call I think. Much of the content of the bill has been well covered in the House this evening. The Greens are supporting this bill and also supporting the Labour Supplementary Order Paper to extend the ban on tanning beds.This bill does take us forward on both provisions. The bill kind of breaks down into two halves—one is in relation to contact tracing for infectious diseases. There has been an extension and an inclusion of new diseases in that list—which is a good thing—including chlamydia which as my colleague Kevin Hague pointed is the most prevalent sexually transmitted infection in this country. So it is very good to have it on that list.This legislation was first written in 1956 so it is well overdue to be updated. My colleague Kevin Hague in his speech at this stage told the story of his experience with the AIDS Foundation—which was quite informative for the House—when he was in the situation where somebody he knew was I think HIV positive and perhaps not engaging in safe sex. He was concerned about interventions and contact tracing. The only possibility at that stage according to the legislation was to inform the medical officer of health who would then go to a court and that person would be detained. So it was a very very blunt instrument and not one that balanced people’s rights versus the outcome in terms of protection. So it is very good that this bill is now introducing stages and that first stage which has already been stated would be the preferred option of seeking voluntary consent from people for contact tracing. Then on a failure of that there is to be a duty for that person who may have been exposed to a disease or who may have the disease to provide the contact information for the tracing to be able to happen. So that is all very good.I would just like to note from that the discussion I have been hearing in the House this evening from members who sat on the Health Committee that it sounds as if it was a very constructive process. It was an interrogation of what this legislation would mean in practice and in the balancing of it on that basis and that is a fantastic thing to happen. That is what we would really love to see happening more often in this House and through the parliamentary process.It does seem that the second part of the bill—which in relation to sunbeds—reached an ideological divide or a brick wall. It seems that the Opposition side of the House was primarily weighing on the side of the need to ban the sunbeds because of the extreme harm that is caused. The fact is that New Zealand has such high levels of melanoma—2000 new cases are identified every year and over 300 people die of melanoma in this country every year—and the information is that in terms of sunbed exposure for those under 35 there is I think a 73 percent increase in the risk of getting melanoma from using a sunbed. That makes sunbeds to my mind—not having been through this process—a dangerous item.It is disappointing to see that this legislation is banning it only for those under 18 particularly in light of there having been supposedly voluntary regulations or a code of conduct for the use of sunbeds in place already that have not been abided by. Consumer New Zealand has been doing surveys and has found that these companies are not abiding by it. So how would we expect them to abide by this limit of 18 years? We know that some pubs do not do it. Are we expecting these people who are already breaching their own voluntary rules to be consistent just because we pass the law?I met with Business New Zealand people the other day to talk about another matter and they said to me: “Jan you know actually if it comes to what we think is a nanny State you pass the law and we’re going to ignore it.” I did not realise business was quite so anarchic but apparently that is how some businesses think. When there is such a problem with melanoma I think actually we just need to ban sunbeds for safety purposes. Thank you.