O'Connor Simon: Health (Protection) Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Simon: Health (Protection) Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 09 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11900. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I want to acknowledge the last speaker Annette King. I think it is actually an implicit sign of how good the health system is that she expects to be alive fit and healthy and a Minister in at least 20 years’ time. I think that is fantastic. It is also clearly a night of celebration as has been seen or visualised in the House but I am very pleased that we are now at this third reading of the Health (Protection) Amendment Bill.Can I thank the Minister of Health and his team for bringing the bill to the House. I thank the officials who had quite assiduously helped us through this bill. I am going to touch on the two main themes within it. There is often a lot of talk around the sunbeds but I will spend most of my time talking on the contact tracing side of it. I thank again the officials for their work and understanding. I thank the Health Committee members from all sides. Other members have said it at this stage of the reading and in other stages: it is a very collegial committee. We work very hard together to try to bring I think the best results possible. We do not always see eye to eye and the sunbed provisions in this bill are an example of that but that does not prevent us working ahead.The context of this bill is a reaction if you will to a lack around how we trace infectious diseases in this country. If I go back I am pretty sure I would have mentioned in my first reading many many months ago that the system before the introduction of this bill really just put a moral compunction on a New Zealander to report an infectious disease and it did not really give any powers to medical practitioners to ensure that someone notifies their disease. In other words if someone was found to have something like gonorrhoea for example a doctor could not force them to undertake—well could not force the person to have that effectively registered or noted. And one of the things we have to acknowledge quite importantly is that even though we are individuals we live in a society and when it comes to things like infectious diseases society as a whole—the community—needs to know.So this bill puts in place what we would term “contact tracing” and it basically puts in a series of steps to allow medical professionals to ensure that if someone has an infectious disease it is notified and they are effectively managed contained and assisted as best they can be. So again the moral side is now replaced by a series of steps and structures to make sure not only that that person is well cared for and looked after but also that the community itself is protected.It is bringing together a range of new—sorry the conditions themselves are not new but it is bringing a number of other notifiable diseases into this category; the likes of gonorrhoea syphilis and HIV are three that come to mind. They are words that you will not normally have me speaking about in public but they come under the bill.Another element is actually around tuberculosis or TB which up until the introduction of this bill has been dealt with as a separate piece of legislation. This Health Protection Amendment Bill effectively ends the Tuberculosis Act and brings tuberculosis in as a notifiable disease. Although I think that we are quite well on top of it it is something that we have to look upon quite carefully—particularly for people coming from overseas.Members on the committee in particular will remember that there was a lot of discussion about hepatitis C and in fact quite a good number of submitters came and spoke. Hepatitis C was not put at the top level of a notifiable disease for a variety of reasons but particularly to those submitters some of whom I know are watching I hope and trust they are very pleased with the Government’s announcement of extra funding to Pharmac which is allowing I believe at least two drugs now that directly affect hepatitis C in New Zealand and is in fact moving from a management to a curative model. So I think that that is quite exciting.Within the whole area of contact tracing I think it is really important to stress the importance of privacy. We spent a lot of time as a committee focused on the importance of privacy but we also heard from a number of epidemiologists and those working in public health that there are elements we need to know about—New Zealanders who have infectious diseases—and that includes the NHI or National Health Index number. We have accepted that and the committee amended that into its report and I am pleased to see it remain in the bill.I just want to finish around the whole sunbeds discussion. As chair of the committee I am very comfortable with where we have landed with this legislation. I think it protects the rights and allows New Zealanders who wish to use sunbeds to continue doing so if they are over 18 years of age. We are not here to if you will mollycoddle every person’s decision but I think we have also made a very clear statement in a variety of ways that sunbeds are not healthy at all. I have said many times on the record that the science is very very clear that the use of any sorts of ultraviolet generating machines such as a solaria or sunbed enormously increases the risk of melanoma but I think really importantly it enormously increases the risk of non-melanoma skin cancers which are in fact far more prevalent in this country. So I certainly encourage New Zealanders to enjoy the sun responsibly and not necessarily to use a sunbed but ultimately the choice is theirs as it is the choice of mine to do what I want in life here. So I think we have a good balance and I would like to commend this bill in its third reading to the House.