Kedgley Sue: Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Bill — In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:611;Page:8068] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party supports the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Bill and many of the provisions within it as we have outlined but we do have some concerns. I will touch on some of those concerns that relate to Part 1 which sets out the key provisions in the bill. 
We are concerned that the bill leaves most of the detail of the new system that we are setting up to be decided by regulation. It sets up a framework but it provides no ongoing parliamentary scrutiny over the implementation of the legislation. We were very happy that we managed to get an agreement in the Health Committee that there will be a review of the legislation in 3 years. We think that is absolutely critical and without it we would have had very serious concerns about the bill because this sets up an overarching framework and it leaves all sorts of incredibly important issues to be decided as I say by regulation by Orders in Council which sound very good but are in fact a secret regulatory mechanism that does not involve any parliamentary scrutiny. Basically a Minister has a meeting with the Governor-General and something is agreed to in that so-called meeting of the Executive Council but it does not involve debate and scrutiny in Parliament. 
One of the issues that we are concerned about and which will not be scrutinised by Parliament is scopes of practice. Everybody has mentioned them. The scopes of practice that this bill sets up are incredibly broad. It is a new concept. I think there is one province in Canada that has something similar but they are an untried and untested mechanism which is why so many of the health professionals have real concerns about them. We are concerned about what happens if there are disputes over these scopes of practice—which are bound to happen—how they will be resolved and what will happen given that Parliament will have no involvement even if very serious disputes occur. 
I give members an example of a potential problem. Say the physiotherapists decide in their scope of practice that they would like to do acupuncture. If my amendment is not successful and acupuncturists are not covered by this bill we will have physiotherapists for example and maybe even doctors deciding to include acupuncture in their scopes of practice. How will we be certain that they will not effectively exclude acupuncturists in their scopes of practice and what will happen if the acupuncturists have a dispute? It will be solely up to the Minister to decide. 
Another mechanism is the ability of the Minister to say that certain activities are restricted. That makes sense. It means that only certain health practitioners will be able to perform a restricted activity. It would be quite logical for acupuncture to be one of those restricted activities because acupuncture does involve poking needles into people and one only needs to think of what would happen if needles were not sterilised if they were re-used or if they were poked into the wrong places to realise that it would be quite a serious health issue. Of course the logical conclusion is that acupuncturists should be covered by this bill. If they are not and it is made a restricted activity that will mean effectively that only health professionals who are covered by this bill will be able to practise that activity. Once again that could mean that acupuncturists in New Zealand are not able to practise their profession even though many of them have spent 5 to 7 years learning their practice. So that would be grossly unfair. 
That is the sort of anomaly that can very easily occur because so much of the detail of this bill—the scopes of practice the restricted activities—are all left to be decided by regulation.