When the economic growth agency captures biotech regulation: ‘A serious question of science’

Just published today on New Zealand’s Daily Telegraph site. Here is an extract - or feel free to jump straight to the original article:

When the economic growth agency captures biotech regulation: ‘A serious question of science’

The agency tasked with economic growth, that controls the science funding budget, wants to have the power of administering the legislation that would steward the very technologies that it directly funds scientists to produce. It’s the most perfect form of vertical integration and it says a lot about the biggest risk to democracy – the concentration and centralisation of power.

The New Zealand public is growing increasingly sceptical about the capacity for democratic institutions to put our best interests at heart. Conventions and processes are in place to ensure that these institutions are transparent and accountable. Public-good policy requires that the information underpinning decision-making is of the best possible standard.

But what if those processes are bypassed? If processes of knowledge gathering are knee-capped? What if scientists and researchers have become so hemmed in by tightly controlled policy that they are more like pawns in a chess game, rather than truth-seekers driven by curiosity to expand knowledge for the betterment of society?

How does this entrapment of science ‘come out in the wash’?

New Zealand’s government agency for economic growth, the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) is so entranced by the promise of biotechnology that has, to all appearances, short-circuited the democratic process and good regulatory practice. The industry-friendly legislation would lower the barriers to market for the very innovations it funds.

It’s all quite extraordinary. MBIE controls New Zealand’s science funding budget. This was quietly achieved a decade ago, using secondary legislation. MBIE’s policies for science funding prioritise the development of patents and intellectual property rights – what those on the inside call ‘innovation’. This means that scientists applying for funding of research projects that don’t include ‘innovation’ outcomes get pushed down the ladder.

This has become a case study that may not only reflect New Zealand’s woes, but mirror the global crises in policy and science across the western world.

Responsibility for regulation of new gene technologies from New Zealand’s Environmental Protection Authority to MBIE is presumed, even though MBIE has no expertise in human or environmental health regulatory processes. MBIE’s Regulatory Impact Statement problem definition placed deregulation, not risk and stewardship as the key ‘problem’ to solve. Then, instead of bringing in a cohort of experts in health regulation, the experts, and groups that were selected in the consultation phases, were the very institutions and interests with financial interests in biotechnology development. And a primary funder across those institutions? MBIE!

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When the economic growth agency captures biotech regulation: ‘A serious question of science’