Street Maryan: Natural Health Products Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Street Maryan: Natural Health Products Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 20 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8810. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I take great pleasure in rising to speak to the Natural Health Products Bill. Once more I wish to pay a tribute to the diligence of the chairperson of the Health Committee Dr Paul Hutchison. He applied himself assiduously to this piece of legislation and the work of the committee was all the better for it so I would like to place that on the record. I would also like to place on the record once again—for the second time in about 30 minutes—that this is an example of the Government changing its tune. When the politics ran out the Government decided to do in office exactly what it had opposed in Opposition. Again we could have had this area regulated 6 years ago had the Government not decided to play politics with it regardless of the fact that it knew that natural health products and health supplements were a cause of great concern. So I put on the record that Mr Ryall now considers useful something he thought was abhorrent 7 years ago. 
I welcome this. We on the select committee wrestled with this issue because on the one hand it is really important to have a regulatory framework around anything that is being sold to the public as having some sort of therapeutic effect. Whether it is a cure or a relief of symptoms the public needs to know that what is on the market for their consumption has been regulated and has gone through a process that determines whether or not the claims that the producer has for that product are justifiable or not. So we found ourselves traversing a wide range of products. 
Just to highlight a couple that will perhaps demonstrate to the House what kinds of issues were at stake here first of all we recommended amending clause 1 to change the bill’s title to read “Natural Health and Supplementary Products Bill”—not just the “Natural Health Products Bill” but the “Natural Health and Supplementary Products Bill”—because there is an increasing number of claims made for dietary supplements that have caused people concern and have required a closer regulatory oversight than we have had previously. In addition we have seen various products change in their application over time. The most obvious example of this and we referred to it in the select committee’s report is honey. We needed to be able to distinguish between a natural health or supplementary product a food and a medicine. With developments with the use of honey there are different products; different uses for honey that have at different moments the purpose of a food the purpose of a supplementary product and the purpose of a medicine. Bandages that are impregnated with manuka honey have a therapeutic function. They have healing properties and in fact Comvita— 
Hon Simon Bridges 
: A great local business 
Hon MARYAN STREET 
: —a great organisation—and others are exporting such products hugely into the Asian market in particular. But honey as a therapeutic product is something that has been used for centuries. So as well as being a food it has been used for medical purposes and as a supplementary product as well. So that just gives some idea I think for the House that we were looking at a range of products. 
We did not want to arrive at a regulatory system that was ludicrous. It was very easy to end up with a system that meant that teabags had to be regulated if they make claims—as the teabags I use all the time do—about peppermint tea providing clarity camomile tea for relaxation linden leaves for astuteness and as a pick-me-up or about lemon balm which since the 17th century has been used as a dispeller of the melancholy. Those kinds of traditional uses should not find themselves caught with ridiculous regulation. And so we have arrived I think at a regulatory system that is neither cumbersome nor light-handed. We have arrived at a regulatory system that requires people who are making products and laying claim to some therapeutic benefit to be able to justify that. Traditional medicines including rongoa are still allowed and clearly have a process for regulation but are not going to be hammered with unnecessary red tape as long as they do not claim to cure things and lead people up the garden path. 
In other words there have clearly been instances that have been brought to public attention where people have had terrible illnesses that some practitioners thought could have been healed by old therapeutic and traditional therapeutic means. Those have not succeeded and people in the resistance to more modern medicine have in fact died as a result of some of those treatments—or the lack of other treatments that could have worked more effectively. I think that we have arrived at a system that allows for sensible protective regulation without being ridiculous about requiring Twinings to demonstrate its claims that camomile is a relaxant agent when people have known that for hundreds of years. Thank you.