Collins Judith: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Collins Judith: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20277] 
JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 I was a member of the Health Committee which laboured long and hard in relation to the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3). It is not a massive bill—although it is certainly more massive than it needs to be—but it took an inordinate amount of time. In particular it took a lot of time in relation to acupuncture. I would like to follow on from my excellent colleagues Dr Paul Hutchison Katherine Rich and Sandra Goudie who have been speaking about that very issue tonight. 
One of the concerns I have is about how the Minister came to decide on the two particular bodies that are to be the sole representatives of acupuncturists. It probably has not escaped the attention of members of the Committee that acupuncture was not invented in New Zealand. It was something that I think was brought to us from China at various stages. We have the particular bodies that were set up and I think in particular of the group whose members are mostly doctors. The attitude was very much that they make up a very small group that does not have particular training organisations or anything else but the members of that group seem to have the ear of this Government. As we have learnt from John Tamihere this Government does have tentacles in all sorts of places and some of them are incredibly unseemly. One of the things that Mr Tamihere told us was that there are friends whom the Government can rely on. I am very concerned that a group is being given the OK to OK people for acupuncture treatment and also for accident compensation payments because it is a very small group that obviously happens to have the ear of the Minister. 
My colleague Pansy Wong has made a very sensible suggestion for an amendment to deal with the fact that the bodies that are being given credibility in some way for acupuncturists are bodies that have set themselves up. They are not bodies that have been set up by this Parliament. They are bodies that this Parliament is now being asked to approve of really in terms of funding for accident compensation yet they have no particular statutory authority as I recall the situation. For instance they are not like the New Zealand Law Society which has statutory authority in relation to the legal profession. Nor are they like the Medical Council. They are just groups that have grown up ad hoc. 
Why are we in this Parliament legislating to give those bodies special powers when we have had no assurance or any reason to believe that they—those groups or associations—will necessarily continue or that their rules will necessarily be rules that we in Parliament think are appropriate? We actually have no authority over those groups in any way at the moment other than to bring in new legislation. So unless things have changed since the select committee days on this bill that is the situation. Here we are giving those people a seal of approval when we have absolutely no reason whatsoever to do that because we have had nothing to do with their set-up with how they run themselves or with their ethics. We in this Committee are being asked to go along with a bill that gives those groups not quite a monopoly right—but together they have a monopoly right—over who can be acupuncturists. So unless the practitioners of acupuncture who have come here from China belong to one of those groups they will suddenly be told that they cannot be called acupuncturists in terms of this legislation. Frankly that seems to be ridiculous. 
So I support Pansy Wong’s suggestion that after the Minister’s final approval the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC)# or another delegated authority could in fact approve another entity if any such entity should exist or come along in future to be approved. Just doing that would actually free up the Minister and future Ministers and the ACC to actually do the right thing rather than to force current acupuncturists to have to belong to a group that they may have absolutely nothing in common with other than the fact that they are acupuncturists. Acupuncturists may not agree with the way the two groups practise with their ethics with their rules or with all sorts of things like the fees they have to pay but we are stating in this legislation that those two groups are the only two that we will ever look at. Well why are we doing that? I really think that the Minister should look at the sensible suggestion from Pansy Wong rather than just dismissing it out of hand because it did not come from the Government.