Kedgley Sue: Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Bill — In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:611;Page:8177] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I too would like to speak particularly in relation to pharmacies. The Green Party was extremely pleased that we managed at an earlier period in time to stop provisions that were originally in this bill that would have completely deregulated pharmacies. But it does seem to me that what we may be seeing—and we can start to see this pattern emerging and this bill is part of that pattern—is the Government trying to deregulate or get rid of pharmacists in a more indirect and covert way. 
This bill has some quite good regulations on the ownership of pharmacies. They all look well and good until one notices that one of those little provisions allows the Minister of Health to recommend by the making of an Order in Council—a secret provision that we continually see slipping into legislation now—the exemption of any pharmacy from all the regulations contained in this bill. We did manage to get some amendments to this provision during the Health Committee hearing and I am pleased about that. Before the Minister makes her secret Order in Council she has to be convinced that health services will be improved that the change is necessary to meet the needs of the community in that particular location and so on and so forth. So we did give some parameters to this sweeping exemption by Order in Council. 
But nevertheless we do have concerns that there may be a hidden agenda at work here. It is a great mystery to me why this Government seems to have a hidden agenda to undermine the pharmacy sector in New Zealand. I cannot understand it. I have tried to work out what is really going on here. It may just be that the Minister has had a fight with the pharmacy sector and as a result has decided that it needs to be got rid of or undermined. I am not sure. 
Anyway what is worrying me as Lynda Scott pointed out previously is that stat dispensing has wiped out 30 percent of the revenue of pharmacies. Can members imagine wiping out 30 percent of the revenue of MPs taking off 30 percent of our income or wiping out 30 percent of doctors’ incomes or the incomes of anyone else? There would be an uproar. But no we just quietly wiped out 30 percent of the revenue of pharmacies. So inevitably there will be a demise of rural and community-owned pharmacies in particular. It might take a year or two but very soon we will see them starting to go into receivership as Judith Collins has said and close down in various parts of New Zealand. 
What will we do then? Well under the provision in this bill we will start replacing the small owner-operator pharmacies in New Zealand which have been in existence for decades and decades. One would have thought the Government would support small owner-operator businesses but instead it will shut them down and will replace them with primary health organisations. Clearly that is the underlying agenda here. 
One of my concerns about that is the potential conflict of interest. On the one hand a primary health organisation doctor will be prescribing medicines and on the other hand a primary health organisation pharmacist will be dispensing those medicines. There has always been a very clear distinction between the writing of pharmaceutical scripts the prescribing of medicines and the dispensing of medicines for the very good reason that there are huge potential conflicts of interest because a good way of making money would be to prescribe a great many medicines which are subsidised and then dispense them. But there are other conflict of interest issues as well. I do have concerns.