Anna Wu
There is currently a bill before Parliament that could significantly change the way all natural health products are regulated. Virtually everyone has used, uses or will use a range of therapeutic products and medicines in their lives. The Therapeutic Products and Medicines Bill has had minimal media attention, but it is likely to affect more of us than the Anti-Smacking Law ever will.
Many people are opposed to the bill, but there have been recent attempts by the government to try and find a compromise.
What’s the Bill proposing?
The bill looks at creating a joint trans-Tasman (Australian and New Zealand) regulatory scheme for the regulation of natural health products products. Standards will be set to control their quality, safety, efficacy (whether the product does what it says it does) and performance. The manufacture, supply, import and promotion will also be monitored.
Who’s finding this Bill hard to swallow?
The National Party, ACT New Zealand, Greens, Maori Party and Independent Taito Philip Field are all against the Bill. In fact, in December last year the Bill’s first reading scraped through by only one vote. The public has also voiced their concern with several nation-wide marches this year organised and attended by 100s of people who oppose this legislation.
What are they worried about?
The Therapeutic Products and Medicines Bill has been nicknamed the “Anti-Vitamin Bill.” Opponents believe the future of natural health products will not be so peachy if the Bill is passed into law. They feel that the interests of New Zealanders will be denied under a joint agency as we have different needs to Australians and products for use in our country would be required to comply with the standards set for the Australian market.
Small businesses in the country’s natural health industry will be at risk. Multi-national corporations may find it easy to meet the new compliance costs but NZ-owned businesses could suffer. If local businesses close down it could reduce the range of products available to consumers and threaten innovation, as competition is reduced. Overall, the prices of therapeutic products and medicines will rise.
National: Health Spokesman Tony Ryall, “Every day New Zealanders are taking supplements. Every day they are trying to protect and improve their health. We want New Zealanders to know that the regime is low cost, not restrictive, and that their choices will be protected. But this legislation does the complete opposite.”
Another major concern is that the proposed trans-Tasman regulatory agency “will undermine the sovereignty of our Parliament.” Regulation will be transferred to an authority headquartered in Canberra “with an office in Wellington”. Because Australia took on patent obligations under the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement, the Bill incorporates these obligations. New Zealand will inherit’ this whether or not it reflects our interests.
Green Party: Sue Kedgley, “It’s a sinister piece of legislation that would involve the New Zealand Parliament handing over its authority to an off-shore agency, set up under Australian law, headquartered in Australia and staffed mainly by Australians.”
Finally, opponents say natural health products are being unfairly targeted with no justification as they are actually extremely low-risk. The Government hopes the Bill will protect New Zealanders from dodgy medicines. Health Minister Pete Hodgson claimed that between 1996 and 2007, three deaths resulted from natural health products. However it was found that coroners in each case ruled the cause of death could not be attributed to natural health products taken.[1] In addition it was it pointed out that during this same period 8000 deaths were attributed to the adverse effects of pharmaceutical drugs, with a further 16,000 permanently disabled!
ACT NZ: Leader Rodney Hide, “It’s nuts.”
Who will benefit?
While supporters of the bill believe regulation will benefit the consumer, the Bills sceptics think its big business that will win out. When the 26 submissions on the Therapeutic Products and Medicines Bill were heard, the 7 that supported the Bill were from pharmaceutical industry based organisations and large Australian-linked companies with financial interests. A United States survey found most people held big Pharma (top-earning pharmaceutical companies in the world) in the same low esteem as tobacco firms.
The Anti Vitamin Bill gets sugar coated: Will that help it go down ?
Because the original bill did not have enough political support, the Government is in the process of consulting other parties about a compromise - a joint agency with Australia will still be established, but makers of New Zealand-based natural health products may choose to be regulated. Those opting out will have to be regulated under a domestic regime and are limited to producing within our shores. To expand business into Australia, they would have to comply with the trans-Tasman agency. This would allow small businesses and producers of traditional medicines to continue operating as usual.
According to Hon. Annette King (Minister of State Services), opponents have been “peddling misinformation” and earlier this year, before the compromise was made, she claimed “the preparation of therapeutic products as part of the traditional practice of medicines will be exempt from the regulatory scheme.” She also denied that “complimentary ingredients or finished products…will be subject to pharmaceutical style regulation.” If that was true, it is ironic that the “compromise” is proposing precisely what the minister was peddling in the original bill.
If you want to learn more or keep up-to-date with what’s happening with the Bill check out the links below.
Reference articles:
“Bill risks medicine price rise” by Sarah Meads and Thomas Faunce
“Big Pharma not always Beautiful” by Richard Wachman
“Sugar coating for contentious medicines and therapeutic products bill” by Audrey Young
LEARN MORE & TAKE ACTION!
www.nzhealthtrust.co.nz
www.greens.govt.nz
UPDATE
Annette King and Minister of Health Pete Hodgson have announced that the Government is not proceeding, at this stage, with the legislation enabling the establishment of a joint agency with Australia to regulate therapeutic products. But the Therapeutics Products and Medicines Bill will remain on the Order Paper to be revisited when sufficient parliamentary support is available… So if you are opposed to this Bill keep taking action!
Mmmm. A sugar rush. You can’t beat it eh? But how much sugar do we consume? A lot more than just what we add to our tea or cereal. What about all those fizzy drinks, lollies and cakes? And it doesn’t end there - sugar is a staple ingredient in most processed foods including savoury ready-made meals. Globally, sugar consumption increases by about 2% per year, and is currently around 150 million tons!
As well as being terrible for our bodies, and almost addictive, sugar also widens the gap between the world’s rich and poor.
But as much as I dislike Saddam Hussein, I dislike the hypocrisy of his death sentence even more so. After all, the death he was so apt at condemning upon his Iraqi people, would not have been possible without our good western generosity. Shouldn’t we feel proud!
Apathy and acting stupid in order to be cute has become a full-time occupation for celebrities, and stories about these women have overtaken real news. Even real news shows and publications regularly feature celebrity gossip in their headlines (recent examples include the divorce proceedings of former Beatle Paul McCartney and model Heather Mills, and the arrest of singer George Michael on drug possession). The ad for a new show on C4 - Meaty (Media Entertainment Around Town) - features host Shavaugn Ruakere talking about some of the planets big problems like unrest in the Middle East and dwindling oil supplies, then she suddenly stops and says - “Who cares?!” and beings to ramble on about the excitement of “real” celebrity gossip.
When you think of issues of global justice, vegetarianism is not one that immediately comes to mind. Many would think that choosing to become a vegetarian is less important than other issues that we should be campaigning for.
Since the industrial age the world has seen a rapid destruction of the environment around us, including increased pollution and global warming Much of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed in order to make way for cattle ranches where cows are fattened up and slaughtered to become tomorrow night’s dinner. McDonalds in particular, along with all its other injustices, is guilty of this crime. (See the 
In terms of energy and protein it is much more efficient to grow food directly for human consumption. And with obesity becoming a problem in Western countries it is obvious we are consuming far more than our energy needs require. Our meat consumption is directly affecting the lives of billions of people.
Everyone in the world desires good health, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights gives everyone in the world the right to have access to medical care that allows them to have adequate health and wellbeing. Pharmaceutical drugs are often able to help provide this, and help people live longer lives. However, not everyone is able to afford the drugs that they need to take in order to live.
The drug companies do not actually discover the new drugs; chemists who are based in universities and other training institutions do. Drug companies merely buy the compounds off these developers. Some of these compounds are existent in nature, but residents of the areas where they have been found do not usually benefit from them.
I boarded the tiny plane in Westport on July 14, nervous and unprepared. I hadn’t even read half of the information we’d been sent. I was excited to finally get a chance to go overseas, but by this stage I had convinced myself it was going to be terrible. They wouldn’t feed me enough (I like food), the people would be super brainy and super snobbish (how could a little West Coast girl ever compete?), not to mention old (I’m only 18 and the people going were aged from 16-30), and I’d get lost (the amount of youth going to the festival was more than the population of my entire town)!
I was immediately welcomed by the 16 other New Zealanders at our one-day workshop in Auckland on the 15th (they weren’t mean after all). And I soon realised I was the only one who was feeling nervous and ill-prepared. And I was one of the youngest people there, but it never became an issue. We all came from different backgrounds, and different parts of the country, but here we were all equal.
Another highlight was meeting three Moriori youth from New Zealand. I never learned anything about the Moriori people at school. All I knew was something about “the Moriori being eaten by the Māori”… It was interesting learning about how the Moriori were still very much alive and the efforts being made to resurrect their language and culture. Their fight to rectify the shame people felt in being identified as Moriori (even more than Māori, Moriori people in the past were looked down upon and forced to hide or forget their culture) was incredibly inspiring.
Over 1000 young people aged 16-30 attended the first Pacific Youth Festival held in Pape’ete in Tahiti from 17-22 July 2006. Aotearoa NZ had a delegation of 16 people (from the North and South islands, and the Chathams) , 8 of whom were selected by Just Focus to participate at our first international event.
“I’ve got a new awareness of colonisation issues in Aotearoa NZ, having seen colonisation through a French lens in the Pacific region”
