A small victory for common sense in the defeat for the Therapeutic Products & Medicines Bill, with Annette King admitting this morning that she just hasn't got the numbers to have this passed. It looks too like a victory for MMP: showing just how difficult it is for any government to pass anything through an all-but-hung parliament. A point perhaps in MMP's favour.
Sadly however, the political opposition to the bill hasn't been based on the stupidity of regulating what doesn't need regulation -- the vitamins and supplements whose use 2.5 million New Zealanders enjoy -- but instead on a xenophobic opposition to an Australian regulatory body. Consequently, the time looks ripe for many of those opponents to sign up to a Bill setting up a local regulatory body with the same overbearing powers as those proposed in the defeated bill.
So as far as small manufacturers are concerned then, this isn't a victory so much as a temporary beating back of the bastards.
UPDATE: Russell Brown mentions Pippa Mackay arguing that this is bad news, especially for "what this means for the approval of all new medicines: longer delays as Medsafe, which had been anticipating the joint trans-Tasman regulator, struggles to keep up, higher costs, and fewer new medicines approved."
2 comments:
PC, do you read the labels on food items that you buy from the super-market?
Eg, a mustard jar with labels as the followings:
- Energy : 35 kJ per/serving (p/s)
- Protein : 0.4 g p/s
- Fat(saturated) : 0.05 g p/s
- Carbohydrate : 0.3 g p/s
- blah, blah, blah...
If you do, could you explain why you do so?
If you don't (read food labels), then , please state clearly you reason?
I think that you're fixated with the right to choose, thus ignoring my right (as a consumer) to know what is genuine and what is not a genuine claim.
I await your explanation to my questions.
We've been over this before. Laws against fraud are justified.
Laws mandating labelling are not.
Laws banning "unregistered" products are not.
If a product is fraudulently offering something it doesn't have or doesn't do, then that's fraud. I'm against it.
But if it doesn't have a label, or it's "unregiestered," and you don't like that, then don't buy it.
You don't need silly laws mandating labelling, just enough people wanting labels to make manufacturers want to label, and laws against fraud so the labels don't lie.
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