Greens and National to set up NZ Natural Health Regulator

The Green Party and the Government have agreed to set up a new stand-alone New Zealand natural health regulator and plan to introduce legislation before the election.

“More and more New Zealanders are turning to natural health products to keep themselves well, so it’s important that consumers can be confident that the products are safe and true to label,” Green Party Health spokesperson Sue Kedgley said today.

There are more than 6000 natural health products on sale in New Zealand, and over 450 natural health companies in the sector, with an estimated annual turnover of $760 million.

“The Green Party strongly supports natural healthcare and the use of natural health products,” Ms Kedgley said. “Natural health products contain many of the vitamins and minerals that are essential for our health.

“We want to ensure that the sector continues to flourish and that all products on the market are high-quality, safe and true to label.”

Ms Kedgley said she was delighted that, at long last, New Zealand was developing its own stand-alone regulatory system for natural health products. It would be a vast improvement on the regulation the previous Government was so keen to foist on to New Zealand.

Ms Kedgley said it was important that New Zealand retained sovereignty over the regulation of natural health products, and did not hand over control to Australia, as had previously been proposed.

“We have listened carefully to feedback we received during consultation on our original proposal, and we have come up with a streamlined system which protects consumers, but does not impose unreasonable costs on business, or penalise the growing number of small, innovative natural health businesses, said Ms Kedgley.

“We are also pleased to announce that monitoring and enforcement costs and capital costs will be funded by the Crown.

This proposal has been developed under the Green and National Parties' Memorandum of Understanding, where it has been agreed to progress shared policy initiatives such as home insulation, protecting our native bush from pests, national cycleway and toxic site management.

Natural health regulation will cover a wide range of products such as vitamins and Chinese medicines. There will be further work to come on the regulations that will accompany the legislation.