Dean Jacqui; Menéndez March RicardoTUESDAY 18 JULY 2023(continued on Wednesday 19 July 2023)THERAPEUTIC PRODUCTS BILLIn CommitteeDebate resumed.Part 6 Other prohibited conduct (continued)CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members good morning. The House is resumed in committee. When we suspended last evening we were considering Part 6 of the Therapeutic Products Bill and I'm seeking a call.RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Thank you Madam Chair. So last night before we rose we were having a discussion about the potential provisions that could be in the bill to better support our medical professionals and patients and I wanted to draw attention to Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 383 under my name particularly the bit that talks about Part 6. As Dr Shane Reti alluded to there is a growing call by medical professionals and experts around the need to ban direct consumer advertisement for prescription medicines. It's one of those issues that I think we've become an outlier alongside the US. In the US we do have a great example of how things can go terribly wrong where big pharmaceutical companies can dominate a market in terms of aggressive advertising to their communities. While that may not be reflected so much here I think we leave ourselves vulnerable to huge power dynamics between different pharmaceutical companies—who as has been acknowledged by the experts their intent in advertisement is not necessarily grounded in public health so much as it is to make profit and therefore there are concerns by the medical community about whether the advertisements in and of themselves actually support public health outcomes or whether they are clogging the healthcare system and adding pressure to general practitioners. I acknowledge that the Minister wants to put this in regulations and I guess my question around this would be about her level of confidence in being able to resource the departments who then would be in charge of those regulations to take into account the multiple dynamics that would exist and tensions that would exist in terms of the lobbying that would end up happening by pharmaceutical companies to prevent banning of direct consumer advertisement for prescription medicines because there is an opportunity to just put it in primary legislation and follow international evidence and international best practice with this SOP. I have to acknowledge that for me it's not so much about which SOP that does this is the one to choose; it's more about getting the outcome that medical practitioners and our community wants right?So to just summarise my question would be around the level of confidence around being able to get the regulations right—particularly concerned because we have seen what happens with the medical cannabis regime in terms of tensions around properly resourcing our departments to make good decisions and understanding that then there's going to be a lot of lobbying going on. With this one I do think it's quite crystal clear in that there hasn't been evidence overseas to suggest that this type of advertisement supports public health outcomes. So I'm keen to get a sense of the Minister's confidence about how she thinks leaving it to regulations will deliver the outcome that I think many of us actually want and that medical professionals want.