The government put the House into urgency on Tuesday, June 30 and they were still hard at it the following month, finally adjourning late on July 4, having advanced an eye-watering 22 pieces of legislation.
The Opposition, naturally, was not best pleased at being thus detained and filibustered in fine style — the examination of the Health and Safety At Work Amendment Bill felt like it would never end.
This meant that some fairly substantial law changes sailed through without anything more substantive from the government benches than ‘‘it’s a great Bill and I commend it to the House’’.
While the approach from both sides of the House is understandable, it is also unsatisfactory. Some issues worthy of great debate were instead seemingly treated with great indifference.
One law change which deserved greater fanfare than it got was the progression of the Mental Health Bill to an Act.
This could, and should, have been the time for great commitments from all parties. The former Act was passed more than 30 years ago and everyone agrees it is no longer fit for purpose.
The last Labour government began the work on what is a large suite of changes in a difficult area of healthcare. Current Minister of Mental Health Matt Doocey took over its work, added a flourish of his own, and despatched it to the health select committee, where it received extensive consideration.
All parties planned to vote for the Bill and indeed, in his second reading speech Doocey — who before politics worked in the mental health sector — issued a rallying call for bipartisanship on the Bill.
‘‘I acknowledge that there are diverse views on this piece of legislation, which were heard through the select committee process. Developing this Bill has involved careful balancing of all of those views,’’ he said.
‘‘I believe the Bill represents a meaningful step forward ... the Bill will enable supported decision making, safer practice through stronger protections for people subject to legislation, and care that is provided in the least coercive way — that is therapeutic and responsive to a person’s needs. I hope to see continued cross-party support on this important Bill.’’
And he was going to get it, but only after more than half a day of going through the Bill with a fine-toothed comb.
There was certainly plenty to talk about in a Bill which aims to modernise mental healthcare, end the use of seclusion for young people, support mothers and their newborn babies staying together while under compulsory mental healthcare, increases family involvement in care decision making, and greatly limits the use of electroconvulsive therapy.
Many of the changes are actions in response to recommendations from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State Care and in the Care of Faith-based Institutions — a process which has delayed the progression of the Bill until now, but given how seldom mental health legislation comes before the House it was probably better to try to address all these issues in one go.
‘‘I welcome the fact that we have a new Bill before us. I agree that it would be great to have cross-party support, and I guess it depends on how one measures that,’’ she said.
‘‘If it’s just on votes, then yes, this is cross-party support. But we really do feel, on this side of the House, that despite the small changes that we were able to make at select committee, it is a bit of a wasted opportunity to make a transformational change to a Bill that probably won’t be able to come before the House for another 10 or 15 years.’’
The plight of those who work and live at Wakari Hospital was a stark example of why reform was needed, Leary added. Having called for an independent inquiry into the treatment and conditions of people in the hospital’s Ward 10A, she was in equal parts pleased that the Ombudsman had vindicated her belief that one was needed, and dismayed that things had had to reach that point at all.
‘‘I’d like to acknowledge Health New Zealand for acting very quickly on the Ombudsman’s recommendation, which was the only thing, really, that they could have done, given the seriousness of that.’’
Doocey, to his credit, was prepared to engage with the other side of the House and discuss the issues raised, which was more than could be said for his colleagues. That said he did — occasionally — get a bit tired and cranky, and especially with Leary over Wakari: ‘‘ Look, the continual reference to Wakari — patients at Wakari are actually under different legislation, the Intellectual Disability (Compulsory Care and Rehabilitation) Act, so that is clearly out of scope.’’
Well, yes and no. That is certainly narrowly true for some people at Wakari, but it is a big hospital and people are there for various reasons and many of those are indeed are covered by the Mental Health Act.
The issues at Wakari extend far beyond the recently publicised issues at Ward 10A, as Doocey well knows.
They have been identified by a succession of reviews but little actual progress has been made on them — to the frustration of staff, patients, families and more than a few health system administrators who, in general, have been unable to push through manifestly needed improvements to the hospital.
This was a theme Leary returned to in her third reading speech.
‘‘It is ironic today that we are talking about updating mental health laws when the front page of the Otago Daily Times has shone a light on the Ombudsman’s findings of some of the worst abuses of human rights he’s ever encountered at Wakari Hospital, which is detaining people who have mental health issues and intellectual disabilities,’’ she said.
‘‘I’m not going to go into some of the abuses that they endured, but needless to say, it is just a stark example of why our laws need reforming but also why the legislative safeguards need to be in the reformed laws so that we never ever encounter that kind of abuse again.’’
We could not agree more.
