We weren’t sure if you had heard about the “Therapeutic Products Bill” that the Government is wanting to pass. This bill is trying to be introduced for the forth time into legislation and is being touted as being for our personal safety. There are already more safety regulations for Natural Products than there are for Pharmaceutical Products. If this bill is passed we as a business will not be able to continue making our natural products for you. The bill details how if you are wanting to use any of the natural products that they deem to be included within it, that we will have to pay a very large fee to use it and then an even bigger fee to be able to say anything about it. Failure to pay will result in a jail term of up to 5 years along with a fine of up to $200,000 or if we want to avoid jail time a fine up to $1,000,000. Sadly this part of the bill is one of the only things within it that is stated clearly, whereas everything else is left very open-ended.
With this bill one person (the Regulator) will be put in charge of deciding what is safe and what isn’t safe with Medical Devices, API’s (active pharmaceutical ingredients) & NHP’s (Natural Health Products). As a Clinical Medical Herbalist of 20+ years I do not believe that they will have someone who is an expertise in all of these areas. This is like putting a fireman in charge of performing brain surgery. This role in itself being delegated to 1 person shows that safety is not the governments concern, if safety was their concern, they would a. have a panel of experts from each field and b. natural ingredients and Natural Health Practitioners would not even be included in this bill. The latter being what they, the Government, promised to do the last time the bill was up for submission, which is another failed promise of our Government.
Now even if we managed to afford to pay for a half dozen ingredients to make an extremely limited amount of products the bill then goes on to state that to sell them they can only be sold via a consultation with your health practitioner. Now you would think that is o.k. with me being a Clinical Medical Herbalist (and being what is considered a qualified expert in natural ingredients/medicinal herbs) the tricky thing here is that what the government deem as a health practitioner is not Natural Practitioners. Medical Doctors, Osteopaths & Chiropractors are who they consider to be Health Practitioners as they state within the Bill. So we would then have to find a Medical Practitioner that would be willing to sell our products to their patients/clients.
Now we could be over-exaggerating, but due to how the Bill is written now (& we have read it from front to back) it is too open-ended/vague for us to know, and unfortunately we can only go with what they have written, we cannot fill in the gaps with what they haven’t written. So below I have attached a link for those of you that want to help save our business, save natural health products, save natural practitioners. The first link is to fill in your objection to the bill in your own words. The second link is for those of you not too sure what to say but want to object, this is a letter of objection that is already written and it goes to members of parliament including Chris Hipkins. Thirdly I have put a link to an article which includes a brief video summing up what the bill is about by Dr Guy Hatchard. For those of you wanting even more information we do have further links of interviews with Doctors & Naturopaths, just contact us if you would like to view these and we can send through. We have until the 5th March to put our objection through We thank you for listening and we thank you for your support.
Tanya & Murray
Link 1: To make your written objection to the Therapeutic Products Bill
Link 2: To put your name to a pre-written objection to the Therapeutic Products Bill
https://oursay.co.nz/index.php/2023/01/22/.petition-hands-off-our-food-herbs-and-natural-products/
Link 3. To listen to Dr Guy Hatchard
