Hague Kevin: Radiation Safety Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Radiation Safety Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 03 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9387. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): I rise to give what will be my final contribution on this bill and actually the Greens’ only contribution in this debate today. As several other speakers have commented I think that the officials from the ministry did a really terrific job of working with the Health Committee on this pretty technical subject and they were praised highly in the debate on the second reading but they deserve praise in this debate also.Simon O’Connor in his contribution remarked on the fact that this bill effectively has two purposes: first to bring New Zealand into line with our international obligations under the International Atomic Energy Agency and secondly to modernise. Barbara Kuriger has just referred to the fact that this is legislation that is 50 years old. I guess there is nothing like legislation that touches on science to expose fairly brutally how legislation can become out of date. Certainly the legislation that we are replacing is obsolete legislation. I wonder sometimes whether there may be some value in having some sort of systematic review of old legislation so that other Acts—like for example the Adoption Act 1955 which is also well past its use-by date—could also be reviewed by this House.I think the debates in the House on this matter and at the select committee have focused to quite a considerable degree on this business of whether or not the bill should cover not only ionising radiation but also non-ionising. Several speakers in this debate have referred to that. The original recommendation from officials was that the bill should cover both—that all forms of radiation should be regulated through this particular statute. There is certainly some sense to that. Poto Williams in her contribution—even though she did not participate in the debate in the select committee—I think had it right when she talked about there being a continuum of energy that radiation could potentially possess and the difference between the amount of energy that something needs to ionise and that which would not be enough to ionise it. The boundary is just a hair’s breadth. There actually is a continuum but in practical terms there is more of a difference.Officials told us first of all that for non-ionising radiation we have regulation that has been kept more up to date. As new devices become available regulation has been put in place that has in fact protected the public from potential harms although I think Annette King is completely right to draw the House’s attention to a bill that we have yet to finish debating that really covers an area—namely sunbeds and solaria—where a source of non-ionising radiation is able to produce the kinds of serious harms that are perhaps more worthy of the kind of strong regulation that this bill provides for.The regulation of non-ionising radiation has been kept more up to date than the statute on which we rely for the safety of ionising radiation. I guess too that the qualitative effects are significantly different. Perhaps with the exception of the sunbeds and solaria example non-ionising radiation is typically stopped and absorbed within the skin and it is within the skin that any adverse effects are likely to be felt whereas ionising radiation will typically penetrate the skin and cause havoc within the body by ionising cells within it. Those particles that are produced by that ionisation process will go on to damage DNA causing either direct harm or potentially mutation that will cause harm down the track. Both practically and in terms of effects there are distinctions that can be reflected in different types of regulation.There are none the less some odd effects that come about from having different regimes for dealing with the two types of radiation. I have referred in earlier contributions in the House to the fact that in a hospital for example—and other speakers have quite rightly referred to the fact that it is in health care settings that many of these forms of radiation crop up—literally within the same radiology department one will have a magnetic resonance imaging suite and technology that uses a form of non-ionising radiation that is regulated in a different way from what may be in the next room and the X-ray machine in the next room will be regulated by this bill. There is an administrative inefficiency that is created by having different regimes for dealing with the two. It is a difficult balancing act I guess to get this right.Although at the beginning of this process I felt that both forms of radiation should probably be regulated by this bill on balance I think that it is reasonable to have separated the two. None the less the level of confusion among the public that exists around the distinction between these two forms of radiation and the subtlety of the difference I think would have justified support for the change to the name of the bill proposed by Annette King. I believe that the bill we are passing into law today ought to have been called the “Ionising Radiation Safety Bill”.I close by making reference to something that I think is probably always worthy of note when the House is debating a bill that has scientific implications and that is the matter of scientific literacy. The submissions that the committee received were small in number and mostly from people with expertise in the field. Some of those submissions were extremely useful but one or two of the submissions reflected a misunderstanding of the science and I know that in some of the more general comments that existed in the community about this bill such misunderstanding of the science was also present.I worry that the internet—one of those technical apparatus shall we say that has come into existence in the 50 years since the original Act was passed—has meant that people have access to an extraordinary amount of information and that information varies very widely in its quality from very helpful and authoritative information at one end through to information that is misleading and unhelpful at the other. That has created a situation where New Zealanders perhaps more than ever before need to be able to discern the difference between the two—to know when we look at something that is on Wikipedia for example or that is found on some other website whether the information there actually has scientific validity. If we do not possess that science literacy then we will draw conclusions that are invalid and the contribution that we can then make to the debate about scientific matters in this country is compromised.I close by supporting the bill but also supporting the House’s doing what it can to improve scientific literacy. Thank you.