Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the opposition, while we agree that people with appropriate expertise should be appointed to the various committees, we do not think it is actually a very good proposition to identify various, dare I say, interested parties to give them a guaranteed seat at the table. People should be identified based on their expertise and it should not be seen as representative of a particular lobby group representing a particular industry interest. Furthermore, given that there is only a very, very minor relevance of this scheduling process as far as complementary medicines are concerned, if one were to pick out a particular industry vested interest, the opposition cannot really see why we should single out complementary medicines in particular, given that they are not actually covered by scheduling, as I mentioned in my opening remarks in the committee stage.