Response to a member's concern

Mark Honeychurch - 19 February 2024

We recently had a member decide not to renew their membership, because of concerns about our submission to the Therapeutic Products Bill. They told us:

Your submission on the Therapeutic Products Act: “…we were extremely concerned about the inclusion of “traditional use”…” but then excluded Rongoā practitioners. This is unbelievably hypocritical.

In case other members are interested in the details of this, here is the response that I sent:

I’ve just been told that you’ve decided not to renew your membership due to the NZ Skeptics not having mentioned Rongoā Māori practitioners in our submission to the Health Select Committee on the Therapeutic Products Bill.

Firstly, thanks for having been a member, and also for having taken the time to read our submission! Most members wouldn’t have taken the time to do this, and it’s great to hear you’ve taken an interest.

I wanted to clarify a small point for you, as there seems to have been a little confusion. As you probably know, government BIlls usually go through several rounds of editing and refinement as they pass through a process of consultation and feedback, both with MPs (during three separate readings of the bill in parliament) and the wider public (during a Select Committee consultation). During this process, many changes can be made in response to the feedback received.

In the Select Committee stage, a subset of MPs receive and read both written and oral submissions from the public. This is the stage where groups like the NZ Skeptics are able to voice our opinions on a bill, including our concerns.

In this particular case, a group of hard-working committee members spent many hours reading over the bill, met to talk about our response, and collaboratively wrote what we consider to be a thorough submission. Our submission attempted to offer suggestions on what we thought should be changed, while also accepting as inevitable that there were some parts of the bill that were unlikely to be changed as substantially as we wanted, with an understanding that pushing too hard against them would make it less likely for MPs to read our submission in a sympathetic way (ranting at MPs about our concerns just isn’t likely to change anyone’s mind, or result in a better outcome for the legislation).

The version of the bill that was current at the time of the Select Committee consultation process, which is the version that we were able to give our feedback to the government on, can be read here:

As can be seen from a search of the document at the link above, this version of the bill doesn’t contain any mention of Rongoā, any only makes use of the phrase “traditional use” - which, as you point out in your message to us, we spoke out against.

Mention of Rongoā was only added later, after the Select Committee process, in response to feedback from the public and commentary from some MPs. This included the National Party’s stance, as they objected to any regulation of Rongoā. Their view can be read in a later version of the bill, which can be found here:

In this version, in the Commentary at the beginning of the document, there is a section titled “New Zealand National Party differing view”, where they argue against “the regulation of natural health products, the regulation of rongoā…”, and elaborate that “traditional rongoā is for most parts treated the same as natural health products under this bill and all of the arguments that we make opposing the bill’s application to natural health products also apply to rongoā” (it was especially disappointing to see that the National Party were not only opposed to the regulation of Rongoā, but also the legislation of any natural health product).

As a result of this feedback, the government appears to have added a section to the legislation titled “Rongoā” (section 31), as can be seen here in the final version of the bill that was given royal assent and enacted:

Sorry if this all seems a little in-depth. In case it helps, to summarise, we didn’t comment in our submission on Rongoā’s inclusion in the bill, because Rongoā wasn’t mentioned in the version of the bill that was current at the time of the Select Committee process - just “traditional use”. It was only introduced after we had given our written and oral submissions, as a result of feedback from the public - including, as we saw when we gave our oral submission, from many large Natural Health companies, who obviously didn’t want their products legislated in any way.

Regards,

Mark Honeychurch

Secretary, NZ Skeptics

My response aimed to be thorough and polite (although I have a tendency to over-explain things, which can come across as condescending - hopefully they didn’t take it that way), but so far I’ve not received any response, and they’ve not changed their mind and renewed their membership, so maybe my response fell on deaf ears.

While we’re on the topic of memberships, here’s a message from our chair, Bronwyn, about some recent confusion with auto-renewal of memberships: