Hague Kevin: Health (Protection) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Health (Protection) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 27 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:4083. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): Talofa lava Mr Assistant Speaker. I want to begin by thanking members of the select committee. As others have said the Health Committee works in a very collaborative way and I appreciate that from members from all sides. I also want to pay tribute to the officials who worked with us. This is a fiendishly complex piece of legislation and the officials did a great job of staying on top of that work. Thank you to the submitters also who are no doubt watching this debate tonight. Some great submissions were heard by the committee. And thanks in tonight’s debate to Annette King and Simon O’Connor for noting my particular contribution to the debate in the select committee and to Jonathan Coleman in fact for agreeing to the changes that I recommended.As others have noted this bill has two parts and both of those parts go to the limitation of individual liberty. Part 1 limits individual liberty for the sake of the public good and therefore seeks to strike the balance on that issue. Part 2 deals with another situation the restraint of individual liberty which is where the State intervenes to curtail the liberty of an individual to take action that would cause harm to themselves. These are two of the kinds of situations that this House grapples with from time to time.Picking up on one of Scott Simpson’s comments in the most recent contribution Part 1 as he said seeks to amend the Health Act of 1956. I am reminded that a couple of years ago in this House we passed the marriage equality Act which was overhauling a piece of legislation from 1955. That legislation had fossilised in law some attitudes and mores from our society at that time. I have worked with Nikki Kaye in fact to draft a bill to completely overhaul adoption law because the Adoption Act 1955 fossilises some mores and attitudes about children that pertained to that time but are no longer relevant in ours. In 1956 the Health Act was written to deal with some particular issues—chiefly tuberculosis in fact—and it applied attitudes towards the restraint of liberty that prevailed at that time but no longer seem as relevant.Perhaps unusually in this House I have had some experience of applying the 1956 Health Act. I used to be the executive director of the New Zealand AIDS Foundation. I dealt with a situation—in fact a couple of situations—in a New Zealand city of a person who had HIV and who had persisted despite all efforts to change his behaviour in having unsafe sex with multiple sexual partners and I was faced with the dilemma of what on earth I should do about it. Doing nothing would mean that a number of people would be needlessly exposed to the risk of HIV infection—something I certainly did not want on my conscience—so I looked to the law. What did the law allow me to do? What did the Privacy Act permit me to do? What did the Health Act permit me to do? I was astonished that essentially the only path that the Health Act made available was for me to notify the medical officer of health who then would seek a court order to detain this man indefinitely. That was the only option that the law provided.So I am relieved that I have played an active part in some of the work that went into drafting the Public Health Bill which sits at No. 30 on the Order Paper—it would be great to move that forward some time—specifically to actually provide medical officers of health with a wider suite of tools and with the option of action that is proportionate to the risks that they are trying to mitigate. I am very pleased to see these measures progress through the House.I did have some concerns—which I expressed in the first reading debate and members of the select committee will know that I raised them repeatedly during our hearings—about whether or not the existence in the bill of the provision that would enable medical officers of health to obtain identifying information about those who had for example tested positive for HIV would constitute a disincentive for people to test. Body Positive shared that concern. We heard the Human Rights Commission also expressing some concern about that point and about whether the contact tracing provisions would also provide a disincentive for people to test.At the AIDS Foundation we provided our own testing services. Why did we do that? We did that because we knew that many of those who were at risk feared going to established health services for testing because even though those services were offered anonymously they did not trust those services to keep their information anonymous. They feared discrimination. So I am still troubled by that risk—whether the benefit of better epidemiological data outweighs the risk that some people will no longer present for testing—but I am reassured by the evidence of the New Zealand AIDS Foundation and other epidemiologists that my fears are groundless on that point.I want to just briefly note my approval that we are adding chlamydia to the list of conditions for which the powers and provisions of this bill can be used by medical officers of health because this is our No. 1 sexually transmitted infection. It is the No. 1 infection which we need to be taking action on. So I am very pleased to see that development.I come to Part 2 which is the part of the bill concerned with sunbeds. As the minority view in the select committee report says like my Labour colleagues—and I am sure that Barbara Stewart will mention this in her contribution still to come—I am disappointed that the Government did not move on this. We have heard for example the evidence of what Australia is doing. We have heard the evidence repeatedly from the cancer organisations and the health experts. In fact I think that almost all of the evidence that the select committee heard on Part 2 said: “This does not go far enough.” There is no benefit to having these sunbeds except in the rare cases that Louisa Wall has mentioned. They should be banned all together. There is no safe level of exposure.I think it was Scott Simpson actually at one point in the select committee—perhaps after we had just heard the excellent submission from Consumer New Zealand—who said that there are still people associated with the sunbed industry who maintain that there is no link between their industry and cancer. The very next submission we heard was the one submission—the one submission—that we heard from someone who said that we ought not totally ban these sunbeds. This was someone from the industry who actually presented us with a couple of reports that she had printed off the internet that in fact claimed that there was no link between sunbeds and cancer.What that goes to is exactly what Consumer New Zealand had told us which is that the industry simply cannot be trusted to act in a responsible way. It has had a voluntary code for a long period of time and as Annette King has outlined tonight the industry has repeatedly and in a prolonged way completely failed to comply with its own voluntary code. In that time many many New Zealanders have been exposed to unnecessary cancer risk. These sunbeds should be banned altogether and I encourage the House to have the courage to do so.