Kedgley Sue: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:637;Page:7924] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 One of the oddities in this particular session of Parliament is that the Minister of State Services is responsible for the development of a proposed new agency called the Australia New Zealand Therapeutic Products Authority. This agency is all about regulating health issues—medicines medical devices and dietary supplements—so it should fall within the health portfolio as it did for the previous 6 years. But presumably Annette King the previous Minister of Health felt that having put so much effort into this authority she wanted to bring it to a successful fruition herself so she got that part of the health portfolio taken with her into the State Services portfolio. So within this Budget we had $1 million spent last year on setting up this new authority—altogether about $6 million of taxpayers’ money has been spent. A whole army of officials went backwards and forwards between Australia and New Zealand with endless little meetings setting up this agency and getting quite carried away about it. 
Now of course we find that all these years and years of negotiation and all this expenditure and taxpayers’ money could be for nothing because it is rather looking as though the one thing Annette King forgot to do was ensure she had the numbers to pass the legislation. It is increasingly looking as if the Government could suffer an embarrassing defeat over the Therapeutic Products and Medicines Bill with the announcement by Phillip Field that he will not be supporting it. It looks as if it is dead in the water. But while the bill is still before the House I think there are a few things we need to examine about this odd agency that the Minister of State Services has spent so much of her time negotiating. 
First of all the authority is being called an offshore entity but it is set up under Australian legislation—Australian corporate law—and is going to be headquartered in Australia. The Minister has refused me 6 years’ worth of Official Information Act requests. I have asked for the minutes of the ministerial council about the decisions it has been making these 6 long years and the Minister has refused all those Official Information Act requests. So much for democracy. But she did inadvertently give me one paper that stated there would be about 550 staff in the authority 93 percent of whom would be Australian and 7 percent New Zealanders. I think that sums up what this authority is all about. It is 93 percent Australian with a little clip-on of 7 percent New Zealand at the end. 
In this offshore authority there will be an unelected and unaccountable managing director who will have completely unprecedented and virtually unconstrained powers to issue orders that would have the effect of law in New Zealand without ever having to come before our Parliament. When the select committee examined the treaty that sets up this agency we pointed out that these powers were completely unprecedented. We examined the treaty and said: “Look what is this odd provision? It says that the managing director shall not be responsible to the board for decisions made by the managing director in the performance of the agency’s regulatory functions.” So this managing director will be able to issue orders about a huge range of subjects. He or she will have the statutory delegated decision-making powers of the Minister of Health or of the Minister of State Services but will not be responsible to the board for any of its decisions. 
So who will this managing director of this offshore entity set up under Australian law be responsible to? There are all sorts of alarming provisions in the bill that sets up the agency including a provision that will give the new authority powers—again unprecedented powers—of search and seizure so that an agency official of this offshore entity would be able to come to New Zealand enter and search a business in New Zealand without a warrant and impose penalties of up to $5 million without having to go through a normal judicial process. This is an extraordinarily odd provision. 
Some of these issues really need to be examined because they have constitutional and wide-ranging implications. A very heavy-handed regulatory regime is proposed which inevitably will increase the cost of dietary supplements and traditional remedies and also the public’s access to them. The problem is that if for example somebody wanted to use a traditional remedy—shall we say a herb called kawakawa—and put it into a dietary supplement but it was not on an approved list that particular traditional remedy and literally hundreds of traditional Chinese herbal remedies would become illegal if they were not on the approved list once the agency was in place. They would not be able to be sold in New Zealand even if they had been safely used for centuries and approved by an overseas regulatory authority such as the American Federal Food and Drug Administration. 
So this raises very serious issues. Why should New Zealanders have their access to traditional Chinese remedies for example taken away from them because we sign up to some offshore entity that is based in Australia with these managing director’s unlimited powers? I am not being hypothetical here. A Chinese herbalist out in Mana has 250 Chinese herbs that she administers. All of them have been approved by the American Food and Drug Administration and have been safely used for centuries. None of these are on an approved list in Australia nor will they be approved in New Zealand because they contain many ingredients and it would be far too expensive to licence these remedies. So they will become illegal in New Zealand. 
I think the Government and all those officials with their endless little meetings backwards and forwards across the Tasman forgot to ask the people of New Zealand and the people of New Zealand have become increasingly concerned about this treaty that the Government has signed and about this agency. They have said: “Hang on a minute.” Basically what this Parliament would be doing is transferring control over all these dietary supplements and traditional remedies to an offshore agency and Parliament would completely lose control over these matters into the future. More and more New Zealanders have become concerned about the constitutional implications of this authority. There are no Treaty of Waitangi provisions and once it has been put into place it will basically be beyond the reach of MPs in this Parliament. 
Another odd quirk is that the legislation that will set up this authority has been introduced into the New Zealand Parliament—it is currently before the Government Administration Committee—but it has not even been introduced into the Australian Parliament. So presumably the Australians could change the legislation after we have passed it here. No explanation has been given for that. We are also effectively almost signing a blank cheque with this particular agency because all of the details of how it will operate are contained in rules and orders and we do not know what those rules and orders are. So it is like signing a blank cheque. We have no idea really of the detail of how it will operate because even though it is before the select committee none of this has been consulted on. 
The other issue of course is that Australians themselves are saying that the agency as it operates in Australia is draconian and heavy-handed. Many of them believe that it has been a disaster in Australia. They are not able to access many of the dietary supplements and traditional remedies that we have here because effectively the agency which is a pharmaceutical-type agency regulates their dietary supplements according to a pharmaceutical paradigm. It has not approved many many remedies and basic vitamins that are on sale here in New Zealand.