Wall Louisa: Radiation Safety Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWall Louisa: Radiation Safety Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 03 November 2015. Volume:709;Page:7640. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker tēnā koutou katoa manako hoki ki a Aotearoa tātou All Blacks.[Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. Greetings to you all and the desire to return to New Zealand of our All Blacks.]Welcome home. It is my pleasure to speak on this the second reading of the Radiation Safety Bill as a member of the Health Committee. I just want to reiterate some of the sentiments that our chair Simon O’Connor has shared about how well our committee gets on and how collaborative it is. This bill was really interesting because the main focus was actually about radiation and we discussed whether this bill actually should include non-ionising radiation and in fact whether we should have renamed this bill the “Ionising Radiation Safety Bill”.What I really want to highlight is just some of the comments that have already been made including that this bill will repeal and replace the Radiation Protection Act 1965—so it is a long time since we upgraded and updated this legislation—to enable New Zealand to meet its international obligations relating to radiation protection radiation safety and security nuclear non-proliferation and a range of international treaties as my colleague Annette King articulated earlier.The bill also provides that radiation use may occur only where the expected benefit outweighs the risks and actually I want to focus on that sentiment for a while. Radiation and ionising radiation is radiation consisting of particles X-rays or gamma rays with significant energy to cause ionisation.For people who do not know—and we had to do a lot of looking up in the committee to understand what that actually means—ionisation means that the medium through which those X-rays gamma rays etc. pass actually acquires either a positive or a negative charge. I think the significance of that particular definition for us in deciding that this bill was actually just about ionising radiation is that we know that ionising radiation causes leukaemia and it causes cancers like lung cancer skin cancer and bone cancer.So actually what this bill is trying to do is ensure as I said before that radiation use may occur only where the expected benefit outweighs the risk. So the intention of this bill is to ensure that exposures are kept as low as reasonably achievable that prescribed dose limits must not be exceeded that all reasonable steps to ensure safety must be taken and that the likelihood of an emergency must be minimised through planning and preventing unauthorised access to radiation sources. So that is what this bill is trying to achieve.I think the preoccupation that some of us had about the difference between ionising and non-ionising radiation actually was coupled with the fact that our select committee had been looking at the Health (Protection) Amendment Bill. That was a piece of legislation that we considered earlier but within the scope of the Health (Protection) Amendment Bill there is quite a bit focus on ultraviolet tanning services or sunbeds. The decision that our select committee made in support of that particular legislation was to ban sunbed use for under-18-year-olds. Why did we do that? We did that because based on the evidence it is actually unsafe. We do not want to put under-18-year-olds at risk and so it does actually overlap with this Radiation Safety Bill because—and I will go back to my original point in terms of the purpose of this bill—radiation use may occur only where the expected benefit outweighs the risk.So for some of us trying to I guess marry up those two pieces of legislation that were before our select committee and trying to understand the difference between ionising and non-ionising radiation it was actually that we were trying to understand why in the Health (Protection) Amendment Bill we have only banned UV tanning services for under-18-year-olds. The overwhelming evidence that we heard from submitters on that piece of legislation before our select committee was that they should be banned for all irrelevant of age.So we thought that if non-ionising radiation was actually part of this Radiation Safety Bill then in fact based on radiation use occurring only where the expected benefit outweighs the risk this could be another area where we could highlight the fact that actually we think—as the other members of the select committee and the Opposition do—that sunbed use should be banned for everybody. So we were not able to make that link. We are quite clear now on the distinction.I think there is still some merit in calling this the “Ionising Radiation Safety Bill” so that everyone is clear but we are yet to I think fully explore that option. Obviously through the Committee stage there may be an opportunity for us to propose a Supplementary Order Paper but the debate that we have had within the committee I think has been incredibly robust. I too would like to thank the officials and the level of expertise that was provided to our select committee so that some of us could understand what this bill was trying to achieve. I think that we have managed to achieve that.I think that where we have come to in terms of this piece of legislation now means that as my colleague Annette King has said we will support this piece of legislation. So I will not take much more time because we have got a Health Committee meeting at 10 a.m. Nō reira tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.