SpeechDr GAURAV SHARMA (Labour—Hamilton West) (remote): Sorry are you able to hear me? That's better. Thank you Madam Speaker. Apologies I'm having some technical issues.It is my pleasure today to take my first call during the historic sitting of Parliament for the first time ever virtually. I want to start off first of all by just acknowledging Dr Reti who was talking about Gorlin syndrome. I actually had to look it up because it is quite a rare syndrome and I was looking it up on DermNet which is the Bible that all doctors go to whenever they're looking at something related to dermatological condition. It was founded by Dr Amanda Oakley who is from Hamilton and has done a lot of good work in making sure that all this information about rare and very common medical conditions especially around dermatology is available to the wider public. But also recently I was at Pāpāmoa Beach during the summer break not too far from Mr Muller's electorate and while lying on the beach amongst all things that I could think of what was really on my mind was the bill Mr Muller has just put forward which is on the Table today.We have one of the highest rates of skin cancers in the world which results from exposure to the sun's ultraviolet A and ultraviolet B rays and one of the highest age-standardised incidence of melanoma in the world with 35 to 40 people per 100000 affected. Four thousand people get in situ melanoma 2500 get invasive melanoma diagnosed every year and there are about 363 deaths from melanoma every year. We also spend quite a bit of money on it—$183 million a year is spent on skin cancers and it is projected to grow to $298 million soon.Now the number one way to protect from skin cancers is to have a strong sun protection against UV exposure and the application of a broad-spectrum water-resistant sunscreen—sun protection factor (SPF) 30 or ideally even SPF 50-plus—is the best way to prevent a lot of these skin cancers. Unlike Australia though there is no mandatory standard for sunscreens in New Zealand and it is important that one of the most crucial things that prevents skin cancer is well-regulated so people can have confidence in the safety standards of sunscreen in New Zealand. Now the Government is separately progressing the regulation of therapeutic products which covers the type of products like sunscreens but other products as well as part of its proposed therapeutic products bill. The current bill the Sunscreen (Product Safety Standard) Bill before us in the House provides an interim measure in regards to sunscreen while the Government's therapeutic bill goes through its development and legislative stages.We do support this bill I support this bill because it will help address the current gap while implementing a regulatory scheme for sunscreen products in New Zealand through the Fair Trading Act to ensure that they meet the standards laid out by the Joint Standards Australian/ New Zealand Committee on this topic. As I expressed in my first reading while Mr Muller's bill is an improvement on what we have at the moment it does not address issues such as using accredited labs how often testing should happen and manufacturing quality control. Now the Government's therapeutic products bill will be new and it will be a comprehensive regulatory regime to regulate a wider range of therapeutic products in New Zealand and will be able to address the issues canvassed by the bill as part of the more comprehensive and complete approach.It was my pleasure to be on the Health Committee through which this bill came. Although the Health Committee did not change the purpose of the bill we did change the mechanism by which the bill operates. New Zealand and Australia have a shared sunscreen standard the AS/NZS 2604 that specifies testing methods for sunscreens and labelling requirements. In Australia the standard is mandatory whereas in New Zealand compliance with the standard is voluntary. As introduced initially the bill required the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs to recommend that mandatory regulation be set to prescribe a product safety standard for sunscreen products. The regulation would be set under section 29 of the Fair Trading Act 1986 which empowers the Minister to recommend product safety standards. The bill will require the standard to be NZS 2604:2012 or any New Zealand standard that was substituted for that standard. In the same essence this would have the effect of moving the existing standard from voluntary to mandatory in New Zealand.During the select committee process however the committee received advice that the empowering provisions of the Fair Trading Act do not appear to allow a product safety standard to be made for the purpose of mandating the Australia - New Zealand standard for sunscreen. The advice was based on the interpretation that section 29(1) is designed to prevent or minimise the risk of injury by addressing potential harm that is inherent in a product. So this was a problem for the initial bill as it was proposed because the AS/NZS standard for sunscreen does not seek to prevent or minimise the risk of injury resulting from the intrinsic properties of the sunscreen. Instead the standard sets out how products may be labelled in terms of the protective factors so that the degree to which a sunscreen product offers protection from adverse effects of UV radiation is disclosed to the consumers.So to address these matters and to provide legal clarity the Health Committee instead decided to recommend that the compliance with the standard should be mandated in the primary legislation. According to this we had to replace clause 5 of the bill. What that does is it removes the requirement of the Minister to make a regulation instead simply mandating in a primary Act that the standards apply as if they were a product safety standard made through regulation.So as introduced the bill's commencement clause provided for it to come into force the day after enactment. That was fine when the bill required further regulations to be made as that process would give time for manufacturers and suppliers to comply with the new requirements. However as the committee amended clause 5 as I've just talked about to provide for the product safety standards to be made in primary legislation rather than through a regulation-making process the immediate commencement of the legislation would be impractical as it would give no time for the manufacturers and suppliers to make the required change. So the Health Committee ended up recommending that the bill commence six months after enactment providing time. In addition to that the committee also suggested implementing some stock-in-trade amendments giving suppliers time to move old products. It is quite important and I think my colleague Sarah Pallett alluded to this before as well.The committee at the end ended up deciding that the existing stock-in-trade should be allowed to be supplied for up to 18 months after the legislation was enacted so that's 12 months after the legislation commences.So I guess overall in summary it is a great bill because it closes a lot of gaps that are present at the moment which are causing harm to New Zealanders—not only in terms of their health and their lives but also it's quite a financial drain on the health system if you're spending over $200 million a year treating something which is easily preventable with a sunscreen lotion. We just need to be able to regulate these sunscreen lotions. I'm quite looking forward to the Government's therapeutic products bill because it will be a little bit more comprehensive and it will include other therapeutic products as well not just the sunscreens. But until that happens and until that legislation comes through it is important that we have something in place.So I'm quite in support of this bill which has gone through quite a significant process in the Health Committee and as we just talked about has had quite a few amendments made to it to be able to come this stage. So I would like to commend this bill to the House. Thank you.