Medicines Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Health: I move, That the Medicines Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

This bill proposes to amend the Medicines Act 1981 to clarify the appropriate use of provisional consents to sell and use medicines in New Zealand. The bill also validates existing consents. The bill will ensure that New Zealanders continue to have timely and safe access to effective medicines through this channel. Section 23 of the Act allows medicines and vaccines to be provisionally consented for early access if there is a significant clinical or public health need. Importantly, that clinical need must be weighed against the risks as prescribed in section 22(1) of the Medicines Act.

The bill removes the requirement for provisional consent to be granted on a restricted basis for the treatment of a limited number of patients. In doing so, it should be clear that this provision, perhaps referencing concerns about orphan drugs, did not protect safety. That was always achieved through the risk assessment prescribed in section 22(1).

The amendments in the bill are consistent with the policy intent of section 23, which is for New Zealanders to have timely access to safe and effective medicines where there is a public health need. The Medicines Act is an outdated piece of legislation that has not kept pace with international regulatory practice. Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted an urgent need for amendments to the Medicines Act.

As can be seen from Part 2, there are a number of other situations where timely access to safe and effective medicines is important—other pandemic vaccines, medicines where a class is affected by supply shortages and alternatives are needed rapidly. I would also note that the Therapeutic Products Bill, which the Ministry of Health is currently working on ahead of introduction to Parliament next year, will repeal and replace the Medicines Act and address wider issues with its relevance and application. The amendment today brings forward some of those planned changes.

The bill does not affect existing requirements related to safety, quality, and efficacy of the medicines in assessment of the therapeutic benefits and risks. Also, the bill does not affect the ability for conditions to be imposed on the use of a medicine where these are justified and consistent with the reasons for granting provisional consent. The bill will validate existing provisional consents, including the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Validation will ensure that medicines currently granted provisional consent continue to be available to New Zealanders where there is deemed to be a clinical or public health need. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I was momentarily taken by surprise. I thought the Minister was going to spend a little more time outlining what is a reasonably unusual bill, as the departmental disclosure statement notes. We are retrospectively dealing with something here. I refer members to page 8, paragraph 4.3 of the departmental disclosure statement: “The Bill has retrospective effect and … [impacts] on matters that are subject to” a prospective court decision. So the Parliament is going to do two slightly unusual things here, two things that we don’t like to do, as the Attorney-General will agree, I’m sure, which is legislate retrospectively or legislate with the effect of having a retrospective effect, but also at the same time legislating for matters that are currently before the courts. There is, as the regulatory impact statement notes, a prospective court decision. Now, it doesn’t mean Parliament can’t do it, and actually we in the National Party agree with doing it. But I am slightly surprised we didn’t hear slightly more from the Minister. Perhaps we can get into that in the committee of the whole House stage.

National agrees with the need for this legislation and we’ll be supporting it, and we agree with the urgency for which it needs to be passed. The reason why we’re debating it, of course, is the decision of Her Honour Justice Ellis delivered yesterday in the High Court in relation to relief sought by applicants essentially trying to stop the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine. Members may want to refer to paragraph 75 of the judgment, which is, I think, the key one, which is the paragraph in which Her Honour notes that it is “reasonably arguable”, her words, that provisional consent granted to the Pfizer vaccine was ultra vires the Medicines Act 1981.

I’ve got to say, having read the judgment and considered the legislative schema, it’s hard to conclude that she’s wrong, because on a plain language reading of the Act, the now very old Act or at least 30-year-old Act, “a limited number” of patients can’t really be described as the whole country. That, basically, is what the case turned on, because the Government has granted the Pfizer vaccine for everyone over the age of 16 who wants one, and we agree with that. That’s a good thing. We want everyone to go and get the vaccine. But, of course, it’s provisional consent, purportedly granted for a limited number of patients.

The argument is very simple. If you’re granting the vaccine for everyone, that’s not a limited number. When you want 3.5 million people to get it out of a population of New Zealand, the 5 million, that’s not a limited number of people. And I’ve got to say, you know, you read the legislation and you think, well, that makes perfect sense. Notwithstanding, as the Minister for COVID-19 Response has noted, that has been the practice for successive years, not just in relation to the COVID vaccine and vaccines, plural, but in relation to other things as well. But a plain language reading of the Act, I think, essentially dictates the outcome that Her Honour reached in the court case.

I was always taught at law school that you start with the plain ordinary meaning of the statute. You look at the ordinary meaning of the words, and the ordinary meaning of the phrase “a limited number of patients” can’t mean 3.5 million people. That’s not “limited” by definition. That is not.

So I think, frankly—

💬 David Seymour: How many people are there in the world?

Well, indeed. I think the judgment is correct. It’s hard to escape the logic of the judgment. But I also think it’s worth noting Her Honour’s conclusion at paragraph 73 around the margin of appreciation given to the Government is the right one as well. It’s quite an elegant judgment in the sense that basically Her Honour says, “Applicants have a point. It is probably true that the granting of provisional consent is ultra-vires the Act, but I’m declining to order relief that they have sought”—which is basically stop the roll-out—“because of the massive impact that would obviously have on the country.” We’re well under way, or at least tolerably well under way, in terms of the Pfizer vaccine roll-out in New Zealand. The last thing, I hope everyone in Parliament will agree, is that we have to stop doing that, and so Her Honour declined to order relief. I’m sure that constitutional scholars out there watching, like Dean Knight from the Victoria University law school, are going to love the idea that the margin of appreciation has yet again been entered into the High Court register of cases.

We agree with the bill and we agree with the need to act with urgency, and we’ll support it, but I do want to make a couple of points. I want to know from the Government, and perhaps we can get into this through other speakers and potentially in the committee stage: firstly, what was the Government told about the chances of this happening? And, secondly, when did they get told? Because I’ve got to say to you, when you read the Act, it is pretty obvious when you read the Act that “a limited number of people” is not going to be the adult population of New Zealand, and any plain language reading of the Act dictates the outcome that Her Honour Justice Ellis reached yesterday.

I’m willing to suggest that the Government got some advice at some point telling them that. And frankly, if they didn’t get advice telling them that, someone is not doing their job properly in the Ministry of Health and/or Crown Law. Because I would have thought a sensible, competent Government would have gone to the officials and said, “We’re really keen to get the Pfizer vaccine rolled out as quickly as possible. It’s very important for New Zealand. What’s the best way of making that happen?” And they would have been told, “Well, the Medsafe process is this and it’s ABC and X, Y, Z, and Pfizer has got to apply and then they’ve got to get provisional approval.” I’m willing to bet at some point the Government was told there was a chance that that might be illegal. I’m willing to bet that that was the case. And it either came from the Ministry of Health lawyers or it came from Crown Law, probably the latter, and that would have gone to Ministers.

I also reckon Ministers were told the way to make this absolutely clear, to avoid any doubt, is to quickly pass a bill through Parliament to make it clear that that can happen, that what has happened, which is the roll-out of the provisional consent for the Pfizer vaccine—quickly pass a bill through Parliament to make it clear that can happen. So basically what we’re doing now, which is tidying up the mess that’s been created, we could have done back in October or November or maybe even September—or maybe not September, because we weren’t sitting before the election, but maybe straight after the election. I’m willing to bet Ministers were told that.

The question for the Government is: were they told that? I reckon they were. And if they were told that, when were they told that? Because if they were told that in August maybe, when we started talking about the vaccines, or maybe September or October when the first contracts were signed with Pfizer and the other companies, then I’ve got to say that we’ll support the legislation, but that’s untidy. You know, we’re now in May 2021, and if Ministers were told in September last year, “Actually, there’s a chance that what you want to happen in the next few months is not going to work out for you legally. You should probably fix that up and you should probably go and legislate.”, that is untidy. It’s not going to bring the Government down. I’m not claiming that, you know, the world is coming to an end and that Labour’s massive majority is suddenly going to capitulate and crumble. No one’s claiming that; I’m certainly not. I mean, God knows, if only it did—but that’s not going to happen. But it’s untidy and it’s bad lawmaking, and, frankly, it’s bad governance. It really is. If you’re told as a Government that it would be tidier to make sure that the law is in place to expedite the roll-out and make sure it’s all legally done according to the law and you don’t do it, that’s untidy.

I want to know from the Government what they were told and I want to know when they were told. And I would encourage the Government in relation to its legal advice to waive privilege if required, because it’s in the public interest that I think we know that. I’ve asked the Minister for COVID-19 Response for the legal advice in relation to this, and he’s declined to give that to me on the grounds of legal professional privilege. That’s the Government’s right, but it’s also up to the Government to waive that privilege. I see the Attorney-General is here and I’d encourage the Attorney-General to waive that privilege. We need some answers from the Government.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

I rise to take a call on the second reading of the Medicines Amendment Bill. Can I thank the Opposition parties for their support for the bill. I also want to make a few comments about this. Can I endorse some of the comments that have been made in respect of the careful way in which Justice Ellis went about her work. I thank her for that. I think this is a good example of the different branches of Government showing respect for each other in respect of what are important issues.

The member Chris Bishop is correct that the judgment, whilst it makes no finding that the decision was illegal, because there has not yet been a substantive hearing of that point, suggests that the Government looks at the issue because, as Chris Bishop has said and Minister Verrall has also acknowledged, there is a doubt as to whether the plain words of the existing Medicines Act, which only allows provisional approvals for a limited number of patients, are sufficient to cover the breadth of vaccination that is intended in respect of the COVID roll-out.

The court suggested that we look at this despite the fact that the Medicines Act has been in place for decades, and similar broadly used vaccines have been given provisional approvals previously, perhaps also with a question mark over at least some of them. I found the analysis of Justice Ellis interesting in her comment that the evidence on the affidavit, evidence in front of her in respect of the application for injunction, showed that often provisional approvals don’t specify the number of patients who are going to be treated by a proposed new therapy, not always vaccines. But in a lot of those cases, it’s self-evident, because the class of people who would benefit from a medicine that’s been introduced for a small class of people is obviously for a small class of people, or a smaller class of people.

The legislation that we have before us today, effectively, changes the provisional regime to remove the “limited number of patients” part of the rules relating to a provisional approval. It does that not just in respect of the COVID vaccine, but in respect of the other medicines that are listed in Schedule 1AA, which include the annual influenza jab that is widely used and has been approved under this methodology for many, many years, under successive Governments.

A number of medicines have been granted provisional consents over the years, under both National and Labour Governments, and it’s clear that the provisional approval or consent power clearly has value for New Zealand. And, again, the reasons for that are discussed in the judgment, including the fact that under a provisional consent, further information can be required to be provided by the provider of the medicine as a condition of the provisional consent, in a way which is not as clear in respect of final consents, and, therefore, it is often desirable that a provisional consent be granted on those terms because it can’t be granted on those terms for a final consent. That, obviously, is something that probably she looked at more broadly, and already the Minister of Health has made it clear that there will be a new Therapeutic Products Bill introduced to replace the Medicines Act, which will look at that more holistically.

In the meantime, we’re left with a provision in the drafting of the Medicines Act, which the judge described as “inapt”—that was her word. We’ve taken the advice, essentially, that was given by the court that we look at this urgently, and as a House we are.

In respect of the question that the member asked in respect of legal advice, I’m not going to give him legal advice or waive legal advice, but I can confirm in the House, which would have consequences for me were it incorrect, that Ministers were not provided with that advice as to the issue that the member seems to think that we were alert to earlier; we weren’t. This first came to the attention of the Government upon the filing of the court proceedings, not before. The member might be correct to ask whether it should have been, but I can confirm that that wasn’t brought to the attention of Ministers earlier.

The other point I would make is that the court’s decision yesterday confirmed that Medsafe did a robust and comprehensive evaluation of the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, and that Medsafe’s decision is consistent with decisions that have been made in other countries, including Australia. I would also note that this is working out very well with this vaccine in other parts of the world, where many millions of doses have already been administered.

The court said that Medsafe’s processes for analysing the COVID-19 vaccine went above and beyond what is normally required. I was pleased to see that recorded. The court commented that “it is difficult to see how the assessment process could … have been more thorough.”, and that New Zealanders can have confidence. I believe that all New Zealanders—on the basis of those comments and because of the confidence that we have and the care that has been taken by New Zealand’s medical authorities—can have confidence in Medsafe’s decision to approve the COVID-19 vaccine. So the COVID-19 immunisation programme will continue to be rolled out here, as it is in other parts of the world, and I, of course, for one—and I’m sure I’m joined by other members in this House—am so pleased about that, because it’s such an essential part of enabling New Zealand’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and keeping our people safe.

So, in closing, I would just again note that this is a very simple bill. In effect, it takes the words out—“limited number of patients”—from the provisional approval criteria. It does that prospectively, but also retrospectively, in respect of the decisions and in respect of the provisional consents that are validated, set out in Part 1 of new Schedule 1AA, and listed in clause 1(1)(a) to (f). And, as I say, it includes the H5N1 influenza vaccine. I endorse this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a short call on this bill, which we are clearly supporting. And just to remind ourselves—we find ourselves in this situation because, as compared to other countries, we don’t have an EUA, an emergency use application, which the US and, certainly, the UK and other countries have. So we’ve had to rely on a section 23, provisional consent. If we imagine the initial intention of an EUA-type procedure, it actually came out of the 1980s with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, where we needed to move really quickly to progress medicines that we believed had core net-benefit over disadvantages. And that whole decade of needing HIV medicines brought us to the 1990s.

I think, in the early 2000s, the Food and Drug Administration first approved an EUA for anthrax for military staff and then in 2009 it became available for civilians for H1N1—Tamiflu, I believe, is what it is. So we find ourselves in this position because we’re trying to jury-rig a section 23, provisional consent, into what other countries have used as an EUA.

I want to support what my colleague, Chris Bishop, was saying about wondering when the Government was first aware that a section 23 may not be suitable. We were certainly querying other mechanisms; I’m looking back at written questions in March around section 29, whether there was something there. So we know that for many months, we’ve been raising the question around section 23 and, as Chris Bishop said, if the Government had some concerns then, then let’s see it. Let’s hear what action was taken.

I think, if I look at this, I’m just interested to know if this has been futureproofed in any way. So I can see the elements in the bill that are going to be carried over into this new amendment. I see the sodium chloride, I presume that’s the diluent that goes with the Pfizer vaccine. I can see some oral contraceptives as well. My question is: if we run out, for whatever reason, of Pfizer vaccine, are we coming back to do AstraZeneca in a new amendment? Is that what we’re needing to do?

And I’d be interested to hear any discussions around whether we’ve considered the merits or otherwise of futureproofing this bill, both for other coronavirus vaccines that may be required or, indeed, to make it clear that the routine flu vaccine is covered by this. I do understand that the Therapeutic Products Bill will fix all of these issues and this redundancy, but that’s going to take a lot of time. If we do need to move quickly, if we do run out of Pfizer vaccine and do end up moving to AstraZeneca or an alternative, again, I come back to that point: are we coming back to the House?

So I’d be interested to know if this is being futureproofed, but our support is very clear on this and we commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The Green Party will be supporting this bill. Many of the earlier speakers have outlined the reasons why it needs to happen under urgency. I just want to really briefly go through the background to all of this. Obviously, COVID-19 has been devastating for the countries that have had uncontrolled outbreaks, including the country of my birth. Huge numbers of people have died prematurely due to COVID-19. Many, many others, some who didn’t even experience the illness in a serious way, have had ongoing health impacts from the disease, and it’s unclear what the lifetime impacts will be from that. So the rapid development of an effective vaccine against COVID-19 has been fantastic and is something the Green Party welcomes, and it is going to save lives.

The mRNA vaccine, of which Pfizer is one, has been shown to even reduce ongoing symptoms of people who have already had the illness, and the severity of those symptoms. So not only is it preventative but it can actually help people who have had those ongoing health impacts, and so the Green Party is very, very supportive of the Government’s plan to roll out the Pfizer vaccine to all New Zealanders. This is something that means that people won’t have to live in fear of getting COVID-19 and having those really debilitating ongoing impacts or, potentially, dying prematurely.

Of course, one of the really terrifying things about COVID-19—and I know someone who was in this situation in the United States, where they initially caught the illness early on in the pandemic and were relatively fine, and over a year went by and they caught it a second time, and they actually were severely ill, and two of them died the second time they got it. So this is a really bad illness, and I am aware that there are people who are out there fear-mongering about this vaccine. I can tell those people, or anyone who might hear from them, that those people have no idea what they’re talking about.

Any potential negative side-effects that have been observed with the vaccine are minuscule and tiny compared to the illness itself, and so we are far better off getting this vaccine, and we’re quite lucky to be in this situation, to be in a country that has been safe from COVID-19 for most of the past year. We’re in a situation where we are able to afford and to get the vaccine. There are some countries in the world that desperately need this vaccine, and they’re not getting it. There’s not a plan to roll it out to all of their citizens, which I think is a problem and something that we as a global community need to work on, because we’re all better off if this illness is not running rampant around the world.

So there has been much discussion about the technical reasons. What this comes down to, the reason for the legislative change today, is ultimately that the Medicines Act 1981 is out of date, has been unable to keep up with rapid advances in technology and medicines, and it’s actually something that, when I was health spokesperson for the Green Party, was constantly raised with me by people who had different forms of cancer. They weren’t able to access some of the most cutting-edge treatments because our process for approving medicines is actually very, very slow and doesn’t allow for that widespread, rapid uptake of something. So it is important. This is a quick fix to that. It’s not the long-term fix, which is to move to the Therapeutic Products Bill, which I know has been a complicated piece of work that has taken a long time, especially given that we had to face the pandemic.

But just to read from the judgment, to reassure anyone who might be concerned about why the Government is changing the law, it is because the provisional consent was only—in the law, it said it could be approved for use for only a limited number of people, and, obviously, we’re not doing this for a limited number of people; it needs to be for everyone. But “it must be recognised”—and I quote here—“that the process gone through here was not an orthodox provisional consent process—it went above and beyond … it is difficult to see how the assessment process could, in the circumstances, have been more thorough.”

So there isn’t risk that people need to be worried about. This was a thorough approval process. Both my parents and most of my friends in the United States have already been vaccinated, most of them with the Pfizer vaccine, and they’re all doing really, really well and are hugely relieved to have received the vaccine. We’re looking forward to the roll-out, widespread, of the vaccine here in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in support of the Medicines Amendment Bill. I’ve got to say it’s the most fantastic time to be alive. Thanks to the twin miracles of capitalism and science, the same company that gave us Viagra has now given us a vaccine that will end this epidemic. What a time to be alive. I think it is absolutely critical that we roll it out and make it widely available so that we can get our lives back. I also want to tell you, echoing what Julie Anne Genter has said, that just last Friday, ACT’s deputy leader, Brooke van Velden, and I were vaccinated. We thought a bit about jumping the queue. We were worried about that perception. I want to make clear we answered the call from the Minister for COVID-19 Response. We considered the fact he was acting on behalf of the Queen and we thought it is our duty to be ceremonially vaccinated in front of the TV cameras for the country. We did it with no fear and I apologise to our political opponents—and particularly the Minister for COVID-19 Response, who asked us to get it done—neither of us have died; we haven’t turned into crocodiles—

💬 Hon Simon Bridges: Well, you don’t know that.

Simon Bridges says I don’t know that. Maybe I have died and this is parliamentary heaven. I have to say, if those were the circumstances I think things would be a little bit different.

💬 Hon Simon Bridges: Run us through that.

Simon Bridges asked me to run through that. I can say Simon Bridges would be here and he’d never get kicked out. But seriously, this is a very serious matter. It is important that we actually have access to this vaccine. And I think, actually, a little bit of levity is the right response to some of the objections that have been made to it. I mean, let me give you the—not a medical opinion, but just a humble electrical engineer’s version of how it works, for people who may be concerned.

Messenger RNA is inside us; it’s everywhere. It’s the way that our body internally communicates, stimulates ourselves to create proteins. And the way that this vaccine works is that it takes some of the messenger RNA that is in COVID-19, or at least identical to it, that stimulates the growth of the spike proteins. And when that mRNA enters the cells of a human, as it entered mine last Friday, the immune system of the human says, “Hello, hello, we’ve got something here like this. I’m going to generate a response to destroy it.” And the immune system learns to destroy those spike proteins. Now, within a few days, all of the mRNA that came in the vaccine is gone. It’s very unstable. That’s why it has to be refrigerated at minus 80 degrees. The spike proteins that your cells produced upon receiving the mRNA have been destroyed by your immune system. The only thing that remains is a memory in one’s immune system of what it’s like to fight something that looks like COVID-19 and if COVID-19 spike proteins do appear in your body, your immune system’s ready to fight them. I actually think that’s pretty cool. But it also shows that you have absolutely nothing to fear because all you’re left with is the memory of how to fight it. I just ask the good doctors on the other side of the House if that’s roughly what happens and they say, yes, that’s actually a pretty good description.

I’ll make a few other comments. This whole saga has led me to ask: why on earth does New Zealand have Medsafe? And some people might say, “Oh, you’ve got to have Medsafe.” Well, let me ask the question: has Medsafe ever assessed a medicine that’s been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and by the Australians, by the British, and said, “Oh no, no, the rest of the world’s got it wrong. New Zealanders can’t use it.” Has that ever happened? I don’t think it’s ever happened. And the question is: is it necessary for New Zealand to have its whole process and rigmarole, which has brought us into this House tonight to retrospectively change legislation, in order to delay the access of New Zealanders to pharmaceuticals that were funded offshore long ago? You see, the sad fact is that, due to low productivity growth and an aversion to putting funds into medicine, we actually are usually at the back of the bus, the last in the queue, to get new pharmaceuticals. So by the time we get them, they’ve already been signed off by a bunch of other countries’ similar authorities. And I just wonder if we shouldn’t be automatically accepting their approval. It’s not that humans are substantially different in New Zealand from humans in other countries—not as far as I’m aware. So, that’s the first question, but it’s particularly acute in the case of this particular issue.

Now, we’re here changing the law in order that the COVID-19 vaccine and some other medicines can be used in New Zealand. And where are we? Well, we’re at a stage where many other countries have reached 60, 70 percent vaccination rates. We are just getting started and the Government’s only just found out that its scheme for approving pharmaceuticals under the law that it had was actually illegal. The Attorney-General got up earlier in this debate and he said, “Actually, we were given no advice that this might happen.” Two questions: number one, what were the officials—Crown Law and the Ministry of Health—doing that they didn’t tender the advice that maybe this would be a problem? And number two, what were the Ministers doing in a governance capacity if they never thought to ask the question? You know, this whole vaccine thing, which is basically our strategy to get out of lockdown, to open up New Zealand, and to end a pandemic, or at least an epidemic within New Zealand—you know, that thing—is it legal? Did any Ministers think to ask that question? It would have been a pretty smart question to ask but none of them bothered to ask it. That’s why we’re here doing it under urgency.

But indeed, the vaccine roll-out has been so shambolic and chaotic that we heard in question time today that we are now second to last in the OECD for the roll-out. And why is that? It depends which week you ask which answer you get from the Government. One week it’s because we decided to be kind and let other countries have it. And then the Government is asked, “So was that actually a conscious decision that was made?” “Oh, well, not sure. It’s just good that we’re here now.” OK, and then we’re told—this was Stuart Nash on ZB this morning—“The pharmaceutical companies decided not to give it because other countries needed it more than us.” Oh, really? So that was the conversation and the Government accepted that? “Oh, well, we’re not sure about that.” And then the answer is, “Oh, well, you know, we have it, but we don’t have the capacity to distribute it. We didn’t think to ask pharmacists to be vaccinators.” This Government literally can’t organise a vaccination at a pharmacy. So then it’s “We’ve got the vaccine, but we don’t have the distribution network.” It depends which week you ask which answer you get.

This latest legal snafu is just the latest in a series of mistakes where we have chaos and disorganisation in the roll-out of a vaccine. And the reason that this is such an egregious breach is that vaccination is New Zealand’s exit strategy. It’s the only way that New Zealand has to get out of locking people out and locking people down because we have no other response. We had to go into lockdown, fundamentally, because our healthcare system couldn’t handle any greater outbreaks. We’ve had to close the border because it’s so risky to let people in because our contact tracing and our testing aren’t up to it. The vaccine was the last line of defence, and yet even the roll-out of the vaccine has been so shambolic and chaotic we either don’t have it, can’t distribute it, or we’re just being too kind to take it off anyone else because we’re so great—depends which week you ask which answer you get. And yet now we also find out the Ministers didn’t even think, “Hey, this big strategy we’ve got, is it even legal?” No, and so, of course, people went off to court, tested their rights, and now we’re here in Parliament retrospectively changing the law.

I have to say the ACT Party, much like National, is happy to support the change. It’s something that should happen. It has to happen in this circumstance. But like so many circumstances in which this country and this Parliament have found themselves throughout the COVID-19 response, it is a Government that is fundamentally reactive and never proactive, always on the back foot, fixing the thing that happened two weeks ago, instead of actually treating New Zealanders like adults, taking us into the confidence and the honest conversation about the future of the COVID response so that we can all be part of it. That would be a better way for this Government to respond but, instead, here we are under urgency cleaning up another mess. Despite that, the ACT Party commends this bill to the House. Thank you very much.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

This bill is set down for committee stage forthwith. I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Medicines Amendment Bill.

In Committee

Part 1 Amendment to provisional consenting provision