Our Mission.

New Health New Zealand is designed to ensure the consumer comes first in all health regulation. It has been created based on a series of guiding principles which are entrenched to ensure New HEALTH stays focused on its key objectives;

Entrenched Principles;

1. The primary goal of health regulation should be to advance and protect the best interests and health freedoms of consumers.

2. Regulation should seek not to unnecessarily limit consumer choice but rather to ensure safety through appropriate good manufacturing practices and clear labelling laws. Product efficacy should only be a secondary goal no more restrictive than for other industries.

3. Regulation should only be used where it can be tangibly shown to further the good of consumers

4. New Zealand should set its own standards and control its own industries. It must not cede control

5. Regulation should be appropriate to each industry based on the actual risk profiles of that industry. Natural health should be regulated through a stand alone regulator, not as a division of a larger pharmaceutical or food regulator.

6. For regulatory purposes evidence should be defined to include empirical evidence, effects and results, traditional use and good science.

7. Traditional and cultural products, remedies and treatments should be preserved and access to them protected

8. It should be illegal to suppress any product, treatment or device which can be shown to be safe and have positive results.

9. Natural Health Products should be maintained as a health option for consumers and protected from commercial attacks from competing industries.

10. The right to make claims for products, treatments and devices should be protected on the basis that evidence is held.

11. The right to advertise and educate the public about health products and services and medical devices in an appropriate way should be protected.

12. Innovation must be encouraged and the regulatory system should be sure to accommodate innovation in a financially feasible way.

13. Health professionals should be obliged to advise patients of all health choices including natural alternatives

14. Regulation should be designed so as to enable low volume products and devices to still be marketed in a financially viable way.

15. Naturally occurring ingredients should only be controlled by way of prohibited or controlled lists (black list approach - innocent until proven guilty) and not by a pre approved ingredient list (white list approach - guilty until proven innocent)

16. There should not be maximum levels of naturally occurring ingredients unless there is clear evidence of significant risk to a wide section of society without such limits.

17. Penalties should be appropriate to the offence and relative to all other non health industries.

18. Every penalty imposed should be subject to review by a genuinely independent authority and in a manner affordable to small and medium sized enterprises.