Professional Practice – Legalities Blog 6

Simon Marks

How can I as an individual massage therapist influence the development of government policy & laws that are supportive of the profession?

As it stands therapeutic massage isn’t regulated within a scope of practice. There are many reasons for this. Among them is the fact it is still a growing profession and there is no true representative for the industry. I believe it will be up to current therapists and those that are training to be proactive in defining our scope of practice and policy / laws to support our profession. I will talk about some of the ways in which we can influence these developments, as well as some of the current acts that massage therapy is already working under.

Although there are no laws and regulations that have been made specifically for the massage community the flowing acts are relevant to massage and must be abided by in our practice.

Privacy Act 1993
Health and Safety in Employment Regulations 1995
Consumer Guarantees Act 1993
Medicines Act 1981
Health and Disability Commissioner Act 1994
Health Practitioners Competency Assurance Act 2003
Injury Prevention, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 2001
Local Body Requirements
Occupational Health and Safety requirements

In order for there to be policies and laws to support and guide our scope of practice, we need to understand how bills and acts are created in order to influence them. Parliament has overall authority creation of laws and dissolution, but we can influence the legislative process that creates them. The legislative process is not a quick or easy process to go through. Meaning a lot of time and effort would need to be put into creating them, although Massage New Zealand and other individuals are attempting to move towards this, there is a lot more support needed. The main way that we and the massage community can contribute and quicken the process is to get involved, and support any movement in this direction.

Ways in which we can influence the legislative process are by lobbying for the bills that are put forward to parliament. As this requires there to be bills to have already put forward this would be a very slow process if it happened at all. The way for us to make a really difference, would be to work on the concepts for bills that will support our profession. To do this we would need to work together to define our scope of practice and look at what we would need to support it.

The legislative process consists of seven steps in order to pass an act they are as follows



1. The creation of a concept or idea – This can be from anyone and they have to go to most relevant MP to the area the bill will be for. A bill draft is created and it is presented to parliament

2. First reading – There is general discussion of the bill and it is either thrown out or taken to the next stage

3. Select committee - Thirteen committees of MPs all in different areas of interest discuss issues within the bill and any changes to the bill are made.

4. Second reading – Bill is debated in parliament more intensely with each principle and clauses debated and voted through.

5. Third reading – The bill is finalised to become an act of parliament.

6. The bill is written into a act of parliament

7. Then becomes Common law and individual lawyers with individual cases have to go through the details in court to apply the laws.

Lobbying can be done by the public (us), corporate and social movements (us) at the concept, select committee, second and third reading to present there points for and against. This is where we can make the difference especially in numbers.

The task of developing government policies & laws that support the massage profession will take a lot of time and effort. I believe there will need to be more involvement and support from the massage community, in order to kick start the process though. As the industry grows its scope will become more defined, this will hopefully make our task easier to accomplish, as at the present moment I feel our scope is too vast to define.