Coleman Jonathan: New Zealand Public Health and Disability (Enhancement of Competition) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Coleman Jonathan: New Zealand Public Health and Disability (Enhancement of Competition) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:629;Page:1831] 
Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (National—Northcote) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to be speaking in support of this member’s bill brought forward by Heather Roy and to confirm that the National Party will support it going to the select committee. A number of strong arguments have already been put forward by Mrs Roy regarding Pharmac’s exemption being removed so I do not think they need to be revisited. But this debate is an ideal opportunity to address the real issue for New Zealanders. The real issue that concerns people out in the street is that of access to medicines in New Zealand today. As we have heard Pharmac has already admitted to the Health Committee and the Government has confirmed that funding per head of population for pharmaceuticals has not kept up with inflation. That I think is a major injustice for the people in New Zealand. 
There is no question that New Zealand’s pharmaceutical policy needs to be reviewed—absolutely no question. And this is where we start to get problems. We hear that Peter Dunne will be leading this review but no one really seems to know much about it. We know that it will be run with the Ministry of Health but we do not seem to know any of the other details. The scary thing was that at the select committee Pharmac did not seem to know anything about the review either. It did not know what the goals of the review are did not know what its involvement would be and did not know what the actual impact of the review would be on it. 
It seems to me that the real issue is that it suits the Government to keep the people of New Zealand in the dark about the review. It does not want this review to be held openly. It does not want New Zealanders to have the chance to come and tell their stories in the open and to tell people how Pharmac is affecting their lives today. The Government is hoping that the Pharmac review will be just swept under the carpet. I might remind members as we have heard earlier this afternoon that this is just one of 69 reviews this Government is carrying out at the moment—69 bureaucratic wasteful reviews. Well I can tell members that the demand from the people of New Zealand is for a transparent review where they can come and tell their stories. 
The member for Rotorua has said that Pharmac is the envy of the rest of the world. She might want to come and meet some of the constituents who have come to my electorate office in Northcote. She might want to come and meet Mr and Mrs Mills from Northcote whom I have spoken to today. They are quite happy for me to talk about their case in Parliament because they want to be held up as an illustration of how Pharmac and this Government are not serving the interests of the people of New Zealand. 
Mr and Mrs Mills are retired people. They are good citizens they have paid their taxes and they have worked hard. Mr Mills is now 72 and he is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. He has to take two drugs. He takes a drug called Aricept and a drug called Ebixa. They are not wealthy people but every month this retired couple has to pay $415 out of their own pocket at the local pharmacy so that Mr Mills can get the medication he requires to arrest the progression of his Alzheimer’s. His geriatrician at North Shore Hospital Dr Joe Singh says that without that medication Mr Mills would be deteriorating at a far more rapid rate. Can members guess what would happen then? Mr Mills would end up in long-term care funded by the New Zealand taxpayer. So we see that if the Government had had the foresight to invest in that gentleman’s care and to invest in the pharmaceuticals that thousands of New Zealanders like him need it would find that in the long run it would be saving money for the taxpayer. It would be saving money that could be spent elsewhere in the health system. 
I am sure that tomorrow we will not see the Minister of Health out there greeting the ladies who are bringing the petition from Auckland. But if we were to I am sure we would see the nice-as-pie Mr Hodgson there. We would not see the angry shouting finger-pointing Minister of Health we see in the House because it is pretty hard to do that when one is confronted with the facts and when one actually meets women with breast cancer who are being denied the drugs they need to save their lives. It is hard to go out and start shouting in their faces is it not? But the reality is that those women cannot get the care they need in New Zealand. England and France cut through all the regulatory stuff. Their Governments said that they would not be held up by bureaucracy but that they would give these women the medications they need. They would not wait for breast cancer to spread to those women’s brains bones and livers. Those Governments were going to give that medication early because the research shows that that action would do well by those women. But that is the very reason this Government does not want an open review of pharmaceuticals. This Government does not want women like the women we will see on the steps of Parliament tomorrow coming and making their stories known because it is all too embarrassing and all too hard. So let us have an open review; that is what New Zealanders want.