Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Madam Speaker thank you. I rise on behalf of ACT in support of this Medicines Amendment Bill (No 2) at the second reading of it. I couldn't help but think about what the member Teanau Tuiono who just sat down was saying. He said something very interesting: We should trust the experts." and I thought that's very interesting. That was the way for thousands of years and one of the greatest advances in the last few centuries was the idea that ordinary people could read the Scriptures for themselves and didn't have to be told what to think by the experts. They called that the Reformation. Then there was the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution—the idea that people actually could think for themselves and challenge. He said that we should trust the experts because you wouldn't second-guess your plumber. Well actually if you've never been ripped off by a cowboy tradie I guess that's probably a reasonable way to be. Well I think it's important for this particular debate that actually we have a balance between trusting and respecting expertise and merit but also being prepared to question and actually challenge authority because I think we've got that balance wrong through a lot of our COVID response. We are now seeing many many different costs to our COVID response that are the result of failing to challenge authorities that turned out to be wrong in hindsight. I'll just give you one example. We were told unquestioningly that we needed to have a COVID-19 managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) system to keep us safe from the virus. Well actually as it turns out behind closed doors in as early as October there was conflicting advice and debate about whether that indeed was true. But that debate was kept from us for a further four months during which time we spent $220 million on MIQ and we kept people out of the country at enormous human cost—and we've only just had an acceptance but not an apology that that was wrong—all because we believed the mantra that you should accept what the experts are saying even to the point that debates are concealed from us and we don't participate in them. So I'd just say to the member that trusting the experts—that was the mantra of humanity for many millennia. But actually critical thinking the Enlightenment and the ability to challenge debate and think for ourselves are equally important and would have improved our situation in material ways as we have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. I digress. This Medicines Amendment Bill (No 2) is not a particularly complex thing although I differ slightly in my reading of it from Shane Reti which I hesitate to do because his expertise and sincerity in all matters medical is beyond reproach. But he said this would only be for the Comirnaty vaccine. It says if there's been provisional consent to "a" COVID-19 vaccine then the director-general can change the way that it is administered how often it's administered in what doses frequency administration the way that it's administered—those things can be varied. So for example without a data sheet we can have a fourth dose where previously consent was given only for a third dose. But I would imagine that that applies not only to Comirnaty but to any other vaccine that has been consented through the normal process. Those ones could also have their conditions varied under this.Where that gets interesting is a question that we'll have at the committee stage and one that I know that many people have which is will this law allow the director-general to approve Comirnaty in much smaller doses—I think it's three—for six-month-old to five-year-old children because there are a great many parents out there who would like to be able to immunise their little ones. I accept there are others who don't want to and that's just fine. But we're here for freedom and choice and accepting other people's choices—we need a lot more of that sort of sentiment in our world today—and there's a lot of parents of young ones who would like that choice. In theory reading this legislation it will allow the Director-General of Health to vary the administration of the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine—it's a problem when you say things you've only ever read—and allow it to be administered not just as a fourth dose but also to younger New Zealanders. I know there's a lot of parents who are fearful and they believe that if their kid is going to get COVID at some point in their life then giving them some baseline immunity now is a worthwhile preparation. I think they should be allowed to do that and I think the director-general should use the law that way. We're looking forward to asking the Minister if the Minister believes that they will.With that thought in mind I think this bill also points to wider issues in the way that we regulate and other members have referred to this saying that perhaps our Medicines Act 1981—it's older than me—should be kept as it is or it needs a serious do-over. Actually I would argue that New Zealand's duplication of regulatory systems where we have our own system in parallel to Australia and the US and the EU and UK and Japan is completely nuts. I mean this is a supposedly First World industrialised developed country that is having conniptions where the leading article in the news most nights is about the shortage of a sandwich of cardboard and plaster of Paris—you can't make this up. But the fact is that because we've duplicated our regulatory systems—we've said we've got Australia standard New Zealand standard—AS/NZS—for building products we've got brands and we've got the councils and architects having their 10 cents there's only one particular type of plasterboard that's managed to run the gauntlet and get 96 percent market share. Now they can't supply the market and we're in crisis but as it turns out plasterboard is on the critical path for most building.I've raised this because actually we have a similar problem right across our regulatory regimes and it's been very true during COVID in our response to it. It's been true across medicines. The fact that we need this bespoke legislation so we can approve something that other countries have been doing for months—that is giving a fourth dose—tells us that our regulatory system is duplicative and broken and we need to fix that. But actually we need to fix our regulatory systems and duplication thereof right across the board when it comes to product markets. We particularly needed to do it and this has been ACT's policy for about two years now—that if a COVID treatment or technology or test is available in those other jurisdictions of Europe the US Japan Australia and the UK and if it's good enough for them it should be good enough for us. If we'd done that for example with rapid antigen tests we would have had a much more advanced response and we'd be a lot further down the track back to normalcy. Instead we are accepting and absorbing all of those costs of our COVID response that may not have been obvious at the time but are becoming obvious now in so many ways. You know kids that weren't intensively worked on by youth aide police officers are now doing ram raids. Actually it's happening around the Western world as a response to COVID response.I'll finish by making one comment that I know will be on the minds of people with anything to do with the regulation permitting or consenting of vaccination particularly around COVID-19. Some people believe that this will somehow be a precursor to mandating and making it compulsory—you will have to be vaccinated—and I can understand the distrust because the Prime Minister of New Zealand stood up and said "You'll never be penalised for not being vaccinated." and then it actually turned out that you would be. That has eroded our social capital and our trust in institutions as we saw in our conflagration outside Parliament which was the irrational extreme end of that eroded trust. I think we need to be clear as a Parliament that nothing in this legislation will lead to it being mandatory and there is something the Government could do which is to actually remove the remaining mandates for medical workers because here's a situation: we are currently depending on who you ask—the Minister had to correct himself today—2500 to 4000 nurses short. Nurses are vaccinated at a rate of about 40 percent for the flu but are mandated to be boosted for COVID and yet there's now more flu in the hospitals than COVID in the hospitals and there are 518 nurses currently mandated out by the requirement for boosters. So can we afford to have 500 nurses missing because they're not vaccinated for COVID? Meanwhile the hospitals are filled with nurses who haven't had their flu shot and the hospitals are full of flu. Where's the logic here? A gesture that the new Minister for COVID-19 Response Ayesha Verrall could make is to stop the mandates for nurses and get the nurses back into the hospitals and if she's not prepared to do that why doesn't she mandate them for the flu shot? If she ain't going to do that there's no logic in requiring the COVID one because there's more flu than COVID in the hospitals. That would be a gesture that would help reassure people around this legislation. But it's absolutely the right thing to do and ACT absolutely supports it. Thank you."