Newsletter Archives
No 3 - 19 June 2004
Greetings to all myHealth newsletter
subscribers.
Many people have
been asking recently where they can find out more information
about the Government's proposal to establish an Australian
based Trans Tasman body to control all pharmaceuticals
and Natural Health Products in both countries and the issues
around this proposal.
One
of the leading opponents of the Trans Tasman scheme has
been the New Zealand Health Trust which has also been
instrumental in the creation of My Health as part of
an alternative model of New Zealand based regulation. The
New Zealand Health Trust has now created on its own web
site, www.nzhealthtrust.co.nz, a library
of many of the documents involved in this battle. Go
to the web site, select documents and then select
the document(s) you want to read. They are pdf files
and are sorted in date order.
One of the archived
documents is a synopsis of the proposed model for the sensible
regulation of dietary supplements in NZ promoted by the
NZHT (of which the myHealth product register is a part).
We
encourage you to visit the NZ Health Trust site and read
for yourself some of the damaging reports that highlight
the devastating impact the Trans Tasman agency is forecast
to have on the New Zealand Natural Health Product industry
if it is allowed to proceed. Also on that site you will find links
to the report of Parliament's own Health Select Committee
which unanimously condemned the handing of our powers to
regulate this industry in NZ to what is essentially an
Australian body. .
Those of you
who have been following the struggle against the Joint
Agency may be interested to know that on 18th June
2004 the Health Select Committee released its report into
the Treaty with the Australians signed by Annette King
in December. It is a report damming to the government
- recommending that the treaty NOT be signed off unless
fundamental issues are addressed. That report is
now available on the NZHT website (top of the list in documents).
Also check out
the news releases in response to the report from NZHT and
The Greens under news on the website
Although
a Treaty has been signed the battle is far from over.
The
joint agency cannot become a reality unless the Government
(Labour) can
convince Parliament (all the MP's) to pass legislation
to make it law in NZ. Labour is a minority Government. It
can't do this on its own and so far all the opposition
parties have expressed their clear opposition to the proposal. If
Labour cannot get enough votes then Annette's Treaty
is dead! The worst thing the industry can do now
is think that the fight is over - it is anything but.
Labour have said
that the all important legislation is likely to be presented
to Parliament in the next few months - watch this space!
Kind regards
Dave
Sloan
NZHT
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