Kedgley Sue: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:632;Page:4297] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I start by looking at one item in our financial review of the Ministry of Health—the proposed trans-Tasman joint therapeutics agency. In this year’s estimates $1 million is allocated for setting up a joint therapeutic agency with Australia and that is on top of $5 million that has already been spent. In our report we questioned the ministry’s mandate to proceed with this project and to spend all this money. We pointed out that it is operating under an executive mandate not a parliamentary mandate. We also pointed out that this huge expenditure of money—we are now up to $6 million—has never come before our Parliament. There is no parliamentary mandate for this project. 
The other extraordinary thing about our hearing on this particular aspect of the estimates was that we asked the Minister of State Services Annette King to come down and brief us in our select committee about the agency but she refused to do so. She refused to come to the select committee to brief us about it. We know she has been meeting with her Australian counterpart. I think they have had 15 meetings and they have made a series of decisions. We asked whether we could see the minutes of those political meetings but she refused to provide them. The Minister Annette King has also for 3 years refused point-blank to address my Official Information Act requests. 
What the Minister did tell us was extraordinary. In our estimates hearing a two-page briefing was sent in place of the Minister coming. I am speaking specifically about what is in the estimates if members want to read the report. She said she expected that legislation would come before Parliament in July. At a cross-party briefing outside this House the officials said the same thing. The officials said that legislation setting up the joint agency would be introduced in July. 
In the House today the Minister admitted there would not be any legislation introduced in July for the simple reason that the Minister does not have sufficient political support in this House to introduce the legislation. She also does not have support from the majority of those in the dietary supplements industry in New Zealand. They are implacably opposed to what she is doing. 
 So basically we are calling on the Minister to call it quits acknowledge that she does not have the numbers acknowledge that she does not have the support of the industry in New Zealand and instead get a cross-party group together to work on a simple New Zealand alternative in place of the legislation. 
The Minister said with great glee that it is terrible that some dietary supplements have been found to cause adverse reactions. That is what she said in the House today. It is good that she has found out about some of those supplements and there should be constant monitoring of them. But what she did not mention was the information that I eventually managed to extract from her after numerous written questions which was that last year more than 20000 New Zealanders suffered adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals almost 17000 New Zealanders suffered adverse reactions to a medicine in a hospital and a further 4000 adverse reactions were reported in the primary health care sector. However representatives of the centre for adverse reactions monitoring said that that was probably only a tiny fraction of the number of adverse reactions that occurred because there is no mandatory requirement to report adverse reactions to medicines. The centre therefore knows that it receives reports of only a very few of those occurrences. 
So here we have 20000 or probably 40000 or 100000 New Zealanders becoming ill with an adverse reaction to their medicine. What are we doing about it? We are doing nothing.