Wall Louisa: Health (Protection) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWall Louisa: Health (Protection) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:11037. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Thank you Mr Chair for giving me the call—for allowing me to speak. I was a member of the Health Committee through the majority of the deliberations in terms of the Health (Protection) Amendment Bill and I just want to reiterate what my colleague Annette King said about Part 1 of the bill. I thought it was incredibly collegial. I think we worked through quite diligently and actually you would have seen that there was only one speaker on our side because it was such a succinct debate—there was nothing really for us to add.But Part 2 of this piece of legislation has been completely different and that really was because we tried to implement some evidence-based action for a piece of health policy. That evidence was provided by many submitters who came to the select committee including the Cancer Society many specialists and cancer survivors. There were people who had detrimental effects not only from using sunbeds or tanning machines or solaria—whatever you want to call them—themselves but also because they worked in industries that as Ria Bond has articulated provided those services. But then some members of the industry saw how destructive this piece of equipment was.I really wanted to give some numbers to this whole debate because in New Zealand we have over 2324 diagnoses of melanoma every year and we actually have 354 deaths. That is the context of my colleague Annette King’s Supplementary Order Paper 180 and the rationale from our side to actually ban these devices. It is also congruent with Australian statistics. Australia has over 2000 deaths per annum and 80 percent of its annual cancer diagnoses are skin cancers. So Australia was very much led by the evidence—it was led by these sorts of statistics—so it was incumbent on the Government and the states of Australia to ban sunbeds and they actually did so to protect the health and well-being of their citizens.It actually costs us over $25 million per annum to treat people with cancers which is a lot of money and I would have thought that rather than treat people every year who get diagnosed with melanoma we would want to stop people getting melanoma in the first place. So if sunbeds are proven—which they have been through numerous studies. There are the World Health Organisation and American studies Brazilian studies studies from France and the EU and the reason I bring up all these countries is that they are having discussions themselves about banning sunbeds. Based on evidence—based on medical evidence—we have already seen sunbeds banned in Brazil but France EU countries and the United States are going to ban them as well.I was just googling before about the cost of premature deaths. Can you put a value on—what did they call it here? I actually did find a table. It is the value of a statistical life. So these are people who die prematurely and if we have these 354 deaths every year from melanoma does that equate to something? For New Zealand the value on a statistical life is $3.35 million so for us at that death rate that is a $1.17 billion cost to the country from having people who get melanoma and then die from it.Hon Ruth Dyson: And it could be prevented.LOUISA WALL: And it could be prevented. That is why this is an incredibly frustrating Committee stage debate to have because I think the proposition in Annette King’s Supplementary Order Paper enables the industry and gives it a bit of time to decommission its sunbed machines and it will recoup any losses. In Australia it was interesting. It actually compensated the operators $1000 a sunbed.