McLellan TraceyDr TRACEY McLELLAN (Labour): Madam Speaker thank you so much. Gosh National don't want a bar of this bill do they? In fact that's all they could put up. They've barely taken a call they've focused on two specific things that were the only things that they had a problem with they got one of them factually incorrect and they got the other one completely the wrong way round. So that was very very interesting. But look this is a clear and unequivocal demonstration of a Government that just simply doesn't have a plan and they are quite literally taking us back in time and taking us backwards. As my colleague the Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall has said they're taking us back to 1981. Robert Muldoon was Prime Minister the first ATM was installed just down the road in Wellington and Brendon McCullum was born and we know that he grew up and scored lots of test runs and has since retired. That's how long ago it was—the Medicines Act 1981. It's a medicines Act that doesn't cover huge numbers of the products that are now routinely used in our health system in a modern healthcare system. Now in comparison the Therapeutic Products Act as we've said was the fruition of a huge amount of work over a series of Governments over 15 years. It was modern it was comprehensive and most importantly—something that hasn't been mentioned and it certainly wasn't mentioned by the Minister—the fact is that it was risk proportionate. It was a risk-proportionate regulatory regime for therapeutic products—and no for the people that have said that the natural health product industry was against that because actually half of them weren't. Half of them were the ones that were right behind this because they wanted to be able to export. They needed to be able to make healthcare claims and medicinal claims and to be able to do that it required legislation. So you are going to be leaving those people out to dry—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Not you". Dr TRACEY McLELLAN: Not you Madam Speaker—obviously not you. I know you wouldn't do that. The Therapeutic Products Act as we've said was just needed. It really kind of blows my mind that if this Government had any plan—and let's remember. I don't necessarily think that this is the National Government because I remember sitting with Dr Shane Reti all through this process listening to all of those thousands of submissions—which many of you haven't heard and most of you don't know anything about—and he only had a couple of small problems with it. So this is actually New Zealand First and ACT. As they said—tail wagging the dog. If they had a plan they would have had an idea of what the two pieces of legislation that they needed to introduce to cover the repeal were and they don't because they haven't done the work. So bearing all of that in mind you've got to admit that—you know why wouldn't you just do some amendments? Why wouldn't New Zealand First advocate during those coalition negotiations that they wanted to amend the Therapeutic Products Act? I believe it's because they were operating under misconceptions about what it was. We had a submitter come to the select committee who raised an apple and said "This is a therapeutic product." and it was like: "No that's an apple. That's regulated under the Food Safety Act. It may be healthy but it's not a medicine." So this Therapeutic Products Act was weaponised from the very beginning by some groups that used it as a means to organise people for their own purposes and this is the outcome of it. We have a Minister and a party that has fed into that and it is now causing this huge amount of disruption and it will leave us with a massive gap in our regulatory framework. So we don't support this bill. It's a rubbish bill. It's a pretty bad way to finish off the very exciting urgency period that we've just stumbled our way through and hopefully the National Party will see fit to make some sort of other comment on it. Thank you."