Free Speech Space with MJ - Sue Grey

Interview with Sue Grey Lawyer

MJ: Welcome, Sue Gray, lawyer. And today we’re gonna be discussing fluoride. Now the High Court has made some decisions and it’s found that the Director General, which was Mr. Bloomfield, has an illegality with regard to fluoride in New Zealand.

SG: Thanks MJ, This is such an interesting issue.

MJ: Fluoride is a very interesting topic, because I interviewed the Professor Paul Connick years ago when he was out here from the US doing a run on fluoride. And this is going back some years now, which you’ll be aware of when the high court then deliberated on fluoride. And that was a very interesting one, because at that time, I think there were three or four judges who said, yes, we’re going to go ahead with them. We find that it’s mass medication, and we can’t do it.

And the minority of judges said, yes, we can do it. But it’s a council issue, or the other way around, sorry. The majority of judges says it’s mass fluoride, mass medication. We can’t do it, but it comes down to individual councils. And it’s a council mandate. And that’s how we ended up with fluoride right through our water supplies. And I find that fascinating, because I mean, the fluoride is damaging.

SG: Yeah, look, there’s so many legal issues and there are so many scientific issues and there are so many human rights issues with fluoride, which is why it keeps coming back to the courts. And so that case you were talking about, I think, is the Supreme Court decision on the fluoride, the new health when they first went to court a few years ago. And that took a lot of twists and turns through the court system. And it’s pretty messy because...

On the one hand, they’re making medical claims for fluoride, that it’s good for your teeth. But on the other hand, the government has made a regulation saying it’s not a medicine. So that in itself is really messy. But what, and it was really a little bit undecided what the Supreme Court finally said, because all of the five judges said really different things. And they, the majority agreed that particular fluoride could go ahead in Taranaki, but they didn’t make any sort of overall ruling on it.

And then as you’ve said, what happened is the government decided to change the law to make it a nationalized decision about fluoride to give all the power to the Director General of Health. And I sat through, I made a submission on the fluoridation bill or the amendments to the Health Act, and I sat through a whole day listening to the submissions and I was horrified.

Because there were people there with all kinds of different autoimmune disorders and genetic conditions and medical conditions giving incredibly strong reasons why their drinking water should not be fluoridated and explaining, you know, basically, as you said, completely debilitating for a whole lot of different conditions. And yet despite it was something like over 90% of people were opposed to it, hardly any supported it. But of course, the government went ahead and did it anyway.

And so the next thing the Director General did was issued these directives to pretty much all of the big water supplies that aren’t already fluoridated. Because there’s only roughly 50% of New Zealand that’s fluoridated and 50% that’s not at the moment. And they’re trying to force all of us to be fluoridated based on a claim that it will make children’s teeth better.

They’re not talking about adult teeth. They’ve got no evidence. They haven’t even got any evidence that putting it in your water really helps your teeth. Only some evidence that topically it helps your teeth. They haven’t looked at the harm from the fluoride. There’s a lot of international research going on about it being a neurotoxin and reducing IQ in children. There’s all sorts of concerns about if you’re already say on medication that’s got fluoride in it or you’re a big tea drinker, you’re getting a lot of fluoride already. Is it going to be too much if it’s in your drinking water? And they know it’s a risk for bottle-fed babies because all of their calories and water is coming from topping up or adding baby formula to water. So if they’re fed from fluoridated milk, they actually get overdosed on even what the government says is the safe level, and many others say that that’s much higher than the safe level. So it’s got so many issues.

Good on New Health and their barrister Linda Hanson for taking this back to court and arguing that the Director General’s directive was unlawful. And she’s got quite a few arguments in the court, but they agreed to do one first and then park the others for a while. And the one that they argued was, successfully, was that the Director General is required to consider the Bill of Rights.

You would have thought that would be a no-brainer, that you wouldn’t even have to consider this, but it was actually a really good decision because it’s so obvious the court hasn’t really ruled on this before, that the Director-General was required to turn his mind to the Bill of Rights and the protection of freedom against enforced medical treatment, and he didn’t.

So what’s happened now is the parties, the Crown and the lawyer for the Bluride New Health have been told by the court to try and reach an agreement by themselves as to what that means. And if they can’t reach that agreement, then it can go back to court again to work out what that actually means, what the consequences are. But you know, you’d have to say that if they haven’t considered a fundamental obligation like the Bill of Rights, the directives must surely be unlawful. And they can’t proceed.