KEY POINTS:
Advertisements which staunchly opposed the Government's plan for a transtasman regulator of therapeutic products have been found by a watchdog to have played on fear and breached ethics.
The advertisements - one printed in the Herald and one broadcast on radio - made various claims about the effect the transtasman regulatory agency would have on the supplement and vitamin industry.
Among them was the claim that 60 per cent of New Zealand-made supplements and vitamins would be forced from shop shelves, and that prices would increase by between 20 per cent and 100 per cent.
Another claim was that the Government was moving to "outlaw vitamins".
The advertisements formed part of what proved to be a highly effective public campaign against the Government's proposal, which was shelved this week because of Labour's failure to get enough parliamentary support for legislation to set up the agency.
But the Advertising Standards Authority yesterday ruled that the two particular advertisements it received complaints about had breached ethics.
The authority found the newspaper advertisement made a number of "absolute claims", without making clear what was fact and what was opinion.
It therefore breached the advertising industry's code of ethics which states that opinion should be clearly distinguishable from factual information.
The authority also noted that the organisation which placed the advertisement - Health Freedom (NZ) - did not provide "an adequate level of proof" for its absolute claims, particularly ones relating to job losses, price increases and availability of products.
The authority said the claims were "likely to play on fear".
The radio advertisement complaint was upheld for similar reasons.
Annette King, the minister who had been in charge of the negotiations for the transtasman agency, yesterday welcomed the authority's ruling.
"It starts to show just what we were up against, hundreds of thousands of dollars and a campaign of misinformation," Ms King said.
The complainant, Natural Products NZ, was pleased but also disappointed the decision had come too late for negotiations about the agency.
Executive director Michelle Beckett said if the ruling had come out earlier it might even have changed the outcome of political horse-trading on the legislation.
Fallout from the Government's failure to get the agency in place is continuing to spread, with argument between National and Labour over who is to blame intensifying.
National claims it was never offered a late-compromise solution, and has questioned the level of consultation Labour conducted with it.
Ms King said yesterday she had kept National regularly up to date with what was happening with the bill over several years.
A pile of letters between her office and various National MPs appears to back that claim, and also point to several private briefings and meetings between Labour and National MPs about the issue.
Ms King said she decided to hand over negotiations to Michael Cullen at a point where it appeared her relationship with National's health spokesman, Tony Ryall, was not helping.
"The antagonism that Ryall felt to me, for whatever reason - by then he'd told quite a number of people in Wellington that all he wanted out of this was my head on a plate," Ms King said.
Dr Cullen and Prime Minister Helen Clark then got involved but National was never definitive about exactly what it wanted, she said.
Ms King remains adamant that Dr Cullen put a late compromise to National leader John Key - something Mr Key disputes.
National also feels it was not adequately consulted.
