News Letter No 36
You may have heard on the news this morning that;
- the Government is about to do a deal to create a two-tiered regulatory system for complimentary medicines and
- that United Future have changed their minds about supporting the Bill to its Second Reading.
It’s a little confusing and we thought you’d like to know what we believe is going on.
Let’s start with the ‘deal’ which is being discussed;
You may have seen Winston Peters on TV last night http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/488120/1181303 talking about a deal which would “keep all the Pill poppers happy”. We believe that there will be no deal as our allies (National, the Greens, the Maori Party and Act) will not support any form of back-door TTGA compromise. And that’s what he is selling – the TTGA by stealth and it is not going to work.
Listen to Peters talk about therapeutic medicines on Newstalk ZB
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters talks with Newstalk ZBs Paul Holmes.
His proposed deal is very unclear and also suggests that natural health products could be in a single joint agency within 5 - 10 years
The second piece of news - in addition to our staunch long-time supporters in Parliament, late last night United Future announced that their two votes will NOT be voting for the Bill to proceed. Yes, this is excellent news.
But, and it is a BIG but... Peter Dunne and United Future haven’t agreed to kill the proposal once and for all, and say what is needed is a “forum where all can be considered before final decisions are made”. (We thought that three Select Committee investigations into the concept were exactly that forum, but clearly United Future doesn’t.) In reality this means they are sitting on the fence.
So the Bill may be dead for now, but the threat of the TTGA is nowhere near buried. We need a cast-iron committement to bring in a NZ regulatory model based on the Health Select Committee recommendations before we are safe.
So while we are very close to winning, we need to keep our eyes firmly on the REAL finish line. Labour are simply not about to give up on this proposal and will keep trying to muster support by any means, until we get a NZ system in place. In fact as you may have noticed on TV last night, they have called in the big guns by side-lining Annette King and replacing her with Labour’s heaviest-hitter, Dr Michael Cullen.
Many thanks for your support - we ARE going to win this long fight. But we’re not there just yet.
Kind Regards
Dave Sloan |
