South Pacific Rim
Yes to Freedom of Choice in Natural Healthcare, No to an EU-style Asia-Pacific Community!
Natural therapies are coming under attack in New Zealand and the whole of the Pacific Asian basin as the draconian Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) seeks to gain legislative control of the area.
In New Zealand, a modern day witch-hunt in the natural therapies industry has been initiated by Medsafe (the business unit of the Health Ministry of the New Zealand Government) as a retaliatory response to the earlier defeating of previous restrictive legislative proposals by natural health campaigners in the region.
As the witch-hunt got underway, scores of website owners were contacted, dozens of health stores raided, and thousands of dollars worth of safe and effective natural products confiscated.
Medsafe is also banning the spreading of even basic health information regarding the effectiveness of natural therapies (e.g. "Lavender helps heal burns"), despite the fact that convincing scientific research and studies exist to support such claims. Similarly, Medsafe is furthermore demanding that people’s personal health testimonials are removed from websites and advertising material and that links to research and clinical studies, or any other evidence of the efficacy of natural therapies, must also be removed.
Meanwhile, Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, has outlined plans for Australia and the other nations of the Asia-Pacific to form a body modeled on the European Union by 2020. The "Asia-Pacific Community", as it would be called, would include nations such as Australia, the United States, Japan, China, India, Indonesia and the other states of the region.
Given however that democracy in the European Union has now been almost completely subverted by corporate interests, Rudd's proposal should clearly be viewed with great suspicion.
Citizens living in the South Pacific Rim should be aware that the fields in which corporate interests are seeking control in the European Union increasingly cover ever more areas of its society, affecting every single life. In particular, they include patents on drugs – with the goal of eliminating all non-patentable natural therapies; patents on genes – in order to gain control over the very molecules of inheritance and life; and patents on genetically modified plants – with the goal to gain control of our daily food and nutrition.
Moreover, the European Union is now effectively controlled by a 27-man, unelected executive body – the European Commission – the selection of whom takes place completely outside the European electoral system.
Chosen by Europe’s leaders, the 27 Commissioners are completely unaccountable to European voters, who have absolutely zero influence over their selection and no means whatsoever of removing them from office.
This lack of accountability is no accident, of course, as the European project is not about increasing democracy, but about the furthering of corporate interests. As such, as the European Union has developed, the interests of its citizens have increasingly become subjugated to the interests of powerful corporations, for whom “facilitating trade” – via the regulatory harmonization of markets, to the benefit of a small number of super-wealthy investors – is the key goal.
Nevertheless, at each and every step along the way, as each treaty was signed, successive generations of Europeans were reassured by their leaders that a regional supergovernment was not the goal, and that the breaking down of trade barriers, and the creation of a “single market,” were the main aims. In contrast, issues such as the loss of sovereignty, the elimination of democracy, and the fact that all of this was being done at the behest of big business, have mostly been either avoided or outright denied.
Is this the model that Rudd has in mind for the people of the South Pacific Rim?
We say that the people of the South Pacific Rim should have the right to health; the right to life; the right to natural food; the right to a healthy environment; respect for human dignity and the protection of social values.
We therefore oppose the formation of an "Asia-Pacific Community" modeled upon the European Union on the grounds that it would lead to the same subversion of these rights by corporate interests as has already happened in Europe.