Roy Heather: Medicines (Specified Biotechnical Procedures)  Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Roy Heather: Medicines (Specified Biotechnical Procedures)  Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20599] 
HEATHER ROY (ACT) 
: 
 I welcome the opportunity to take a further call on this very important matter and I would like to thank Dr Paul Hutchison for the light that he has shed on this matter. It is unfortunate I think that the only serious scientific debate we are to have on this matter in the near future is taking place here today—here in a Parliament where there are no experts in fact. Here we are a group of members of Parliament most of whom are not qualified to comment on this issue. Both the National Party and the ACT party are opposed to this legislation. What we should be having is a much wider debate with the experts involved but unfortunately that has been denied to New Zealand to the detriment of science. 
The obvious question following on from what I said when I spoke previously is whether pig insulin is safe for humans. I think that has been answered by decades of injecting millions of diabetics with pig insulin. I would have thought that was a very good starting-point for this debate yet that question is being ignored by most of the parties here today. The decades of injecting millions of diabetics with pig insulin have proven that in fact pig insulin is safe for human beings. 
Here in New Zealand we do have very rigorous regulatory regimes to control research and those too have been largely ignored by this wider debate. I would like to mention Professor Roger Morris of the New Zealand veterinary school. I am told that Professor Morris is a world expert on the transfer of animal viruses to humans. There has been much talk by various politicians about retroviruses during the first and second readings of this bill. Professor Morris is a main adviser to the UK Government on foot-and-mouth disease and to the Hong Kong Government on duck and hen infections jumping into humans—and there has been much talk of that particular case in the last couple of years. 
Professor Morris has this to say: “It is riskier going to the zoo than to have one of these pancreatic cell transplants.” That is what the expert declares. I will read that again. “It is riskier going to the zoo than to have one of these pancreatic cell transplants.” Now that is quite something coming from somebody whom the United Kingdom Government is happy to take advice from on the issue of the transfer of foot-and-mouth disease and the Hong Kong Government to take advice from on duck and hen infections. Professor Morris added after he said that is it riskier to go to the zoo that: “I don’t believe it is risky going to the zoo.” I ask members to show me a New Zealander who believes that it is risky to go to the zoo. So there we go; that is from the mouth of an expert. But unfortunately despite the fact that some people at the Health Committee would have liked to see some of the evidence from the expert the debate has been denied that sort of comment. 
New Zealand of course has been a world leader in promoting this promising treatment for diabetics—xenotransplantation—and Dr Hutchison gave a very good overview of it just before. We have the healthiest pigs I am told as well as the best monitoring technology. I would have thought as someone who has been involved with research that those three things combined would actually mean that New Zealand was a very good and safe place for the research to take place. But no political expediency in this election year is much more important to the Government than that. So we will deny our world-leading scientists the opportunity to continue their research here. We will deny an opportunity to the diabetics of this country who after being well informed volunteered to participate in this world-leading research here in New Zealand and some of our best and brightest scientists have been driven overseas. New Zealand diabetics will have to go overseas for these transplants which are permitted in countries that are frequently put forward as being advanced in that sort of area. I am talking about countries such as Switzerland Sweden and the USA. How often when we talk about knowledge economies do we put those countries forward as examples to follow? 
What we have are political power-seekers who have usurped the status of experts—who have usurped our scientists our people who actually know the real issues we are talking about in this debate. But no here in New Zealand today we will have misinformed debate on retroviruses.