Ririnui Mita: Public Health Bill — First Reading 
Ririnui Mita: Public Health Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:644;Page:13844] 
Hon MITA RIRINUI (Associate Minister of Health) 
: 
 I rise to support the Public Health Bill. The Public Health Bill is fundamental health legislation. It is extensive and it covers many areas of public health. The bill is designed to improve promote and protect public health. It includes provisions designed to manage actual and potential risks to public health to give clear responsibilities and accountabilities to ensure monitoring and reporting of public health risks to give explicit emergency powers and to avoid undue infringement of human rights and privacy. 
A main feature of the bill is that it sets out the purpose powers functions and duties of the various key players including the Minister of Health the Director-General of Health the Director of Public Health the district health boards and the territorial authorities and statutory officers—namely medical officers of health health protection officers and environmental health officers. The bill organises the key players into three levels of operation: locally through statutory officers; regionally through district health boards and territorial authorities; and nationally through the Minister of Health the Director-General of Health and the Director of Public Health. 
The bill contains provisions regarding health information notification and cervical screening. The health information provisions largely reproduce the Health Act which defines and provides the routine information flows of personal health information updates existing audit provisions and provides for notification of specified conditions. Notification provisions include for example a duty on medical practitioners in laboratories to report conditions such as typhoid. 
As will be mentioned in further detail in other speeches the bill contains provisions relating to non-communicable disease risk factors. These provisions provide principles and non-binding codes for reducing non-communicable disease risk factors—for example through improved nutrition—as well as legislate for a parliamentary report back on possible further legislative measures to address non-communicable disease risk factors. The bill also provides the option of making regulations to reduce or assist in reducing risk factors associated with non-communicable diseases. 
The bill contains provisions to manage conditions posing a health risk. Communicable conditions such as HIV hepatitis and tuberculosis pose risks of infection to others unless appropriate steps are taken to prevent or minimise such risks. The current Health Act simply provides for the detection of people with notifiable conditions through the decision of the medical officer of health with no time periods or appeal provisions specified other than that the person may be held until he or she is no longer infectious. In contrast this bill aims to build on existing provisions in the Health Act and the Tuberculosis Act within a human rights framework that includes explicit time periods and appeal provisions. 
The bill also aims to provide a range of options—rather than only the detention option in the Health Act—for preventing the spread of communicable conditions that pose a risk to public health. Contact tracing involves identifying and seeking people who have been in contact with a person who has a communicable disease such as tuberculosis in order to prevent the further spread of the disease. The bill includes provisions that enable medical officers and medical health practitioners to undertake such contact tracing. 
Local government already has an extensive public health role under the Health Act principally in relation to environmental health—in other words public health matters related to the physical environment such as sewerage. The bill largely reproduces the Health Act functions of territorial authorities in relation to environmental health with minor modifications to update and modernise the language. The bill introduces a new framework to regulate activities that may pose a public health risk. Industries that are regulated under public health provisions such as camping grounds and hairdressers will continue to be regulated in the same way as they are now. At some point in the future and with consultation the regulations will be revised to reflect the new framework and consideration may be given in the future to whether other activities that pose a risk to public health should be regulated under the framework. 
The bill implements an all-risks approach to emergencies by providing special powers that can be used to manage an actual or imminent public health emergency irrespective of cause. This means infectious diseases as well as emergencies arising from physical chemical or radiological factors. The border health protection provisions aim to prevent reduce or eliminate the spread of risk to public health at the border. They relate in particular to people and craft coming into or leaving New Zealand as possible sources of infection. I commend this bill to the House.