Faafoi Kris: Natural Health Products Bill — First Reading 
Faafoi Kris: Natural Health Products Bill — First Reading 
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KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana) 
: 
 Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to the Natural Health Products Bill. The choice of words—the use of the word “timely”—by the previous speaker Dr Paul Hutchison was very interesting. 
Hon Steve Chadwick 
: Timely! 
KRIS FAAFOI 
: It is quite laughable because we have wasted 5 years in this Parliament while the National Party when in Opposition was flapping its arms around and saying that a trans-Tasman agreement on this issue was bad evil and what have you. We have wasted 5 years then when National came into office in 2008 it cosied up to the Greens and all of a sudden this bill was the best thing we have ever seen. So when Mr Hutchison says that this bill is timely I tell him we could have been dealing with this legislation 5 years ago. But National decided to play politics with it. I reiterate the words of Michelle Beckett the executive director of Natural Products New Zealand which my colleague Grant Robertson mentioned earlier: “The National Party is using this as a political football to be leveraged to any political advantage.” To now say that this bill is timely is just quite laughable. 
However having said that Labour will support the bill to the select committee. But we do that with a number of reservations. Our reservations echo a number of the concerns that were picked up by the Ministry of Health in its regulatory impact statement. One of those concerns was around the inadequacy of the scheme to be rigorous enough and therefore to be up to date with international best-practice and the robustness of the scheme in terms of being able to guarantee that the products were safe and true to their claim. The concern also was whether it had been recognised by some of our trading partners and whether it would be up to that level of scrutiny. We believe that in sending the bill to the select committee we can try to iron out some of those concerns raised in the regulatory impact statement. 
There is also some concern in that statement about the small amount of information that is known about natural health products. We think that if we are going to introduce a regulatory framework we need to know the size of it. We need to know what is going on within the industry. We need to get an idea as Grant Robertson said earlier of the costs involved in bringing in these regulations and also some of the constraints that may be put on the Ministry of Health as it polices these regulations. On that aspect we welcome the proposal to phase in some of the regulations to collect information and also to see what products are out there in the market at the moment and to figure out what kinds of fees and levies can be charged over time. As we say there will be significant costs within this bill to make sure that it achieves what it should achieve and what we hope it will achieve. 
The most important thing about this bill is the health and safety of New Zealanders. It has been noted that a lot of these natural health products claim to have quite significant therapeutic qualities or benefits. When looking through some of the information around this issue I was quite surprised what little regulation and oversight there is at the moment of some of the ingredients that go into some of these natural health products. Since the legislation that currently polices this area was introduced in 1985 quite a significant amount of additives have come into existence which are going into these products. I think we need to make sure there is significant oversight. Given the nature of some of these things—we are talking about pills tablets syrups and powders which all claim to have some positive effect on health—it is surprising that we have little oversight. It is again a little disappointing that we could have done this 5 years ago but it was not done especially when we consider the ailments or illnesses that some of these products claim to treat. We are looking at conditions like arthritis and psoriasis and some of these products even go into manuka honey which of course has some therapeutic qualities I am told. But I guess when we are looking at some of these very serious illnesses and the nature of some of these products we need public scrutiny of the ability of this bill to meet its purpose. That is why Labour will be supporting it to the select committee.