 My name is Janet McLean, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you this evening to Professor Joanna Manning's inaugural lecture. Professor Manning undertok her BA Aquılladankola hon formula of honan TLB here at Auckland University where she excelled across a range of subjects from criminal law, tort law, contract law, to administrative law. She received a host of prizes, including winning the coveted Start Shield. After postgraduate study in the United States on a Rotary scholarship, she worked for some time as a crown prosecutor before joining the faculty at Auckland. Her strengths in both public and private law continued to show through, a nda tawt a range of subjects from tawt law to administrative law combining her teaching with bringing up three children and serving for a time as lay member on the medical practitioner's disciplinary committee. The latter was her first foray into medical law which would subsequently become the area in which she distinguished herself and established her scholarship nationally and internationally. It's an area in which she's able to combine her broad legal expertise with a deep interest in moral questions, compassion and a sense of justice. She's also become legendary in the faculty as knowing a huge range of medical procedures and symptoms in some detail and though as a good tawt lawyer she would never hold herself out as giving medical advice she would um she can always recommend who not to go to for medical assistance. Professor Manning is an exemplary colleague, academic friend and professor of law and I now invite her to address you. Thank you Janet for your overly generous remarks. I got a text from my younger middle son earlier on today saying good luck for your inauguration as president tonight mama but I do feel privileged in having two very dear friends and longstanding colleagues to both introduce and to close my lecture tonight. Thank you both. No mai, haere mai, welcome to Your Honour, the Dean, my colleagues, my Cartwright Collector friends, some of whom are here tonight. Here's a recent photo of them. In particular I want to acknowledge and dedicate my lecture tonight to Linda Williams. She's the one in the middle holding the flowers. We were celebrating her new year's honour this year in recognition of her enormous and tireless work over decades on behalf of New Zealand health consumers especially women. It was Linda who alerted me to this rather worrisome topic that I'm addressing tonight having learned about it, she had learned about it from attending ethics committees and DHB committees for years on behalf of the Auckland Women's Health Council. Thank you for your work Linda. Welcome also to friends, to neighbours, to my biking buddies and family and thank you all for making the effort to come out tonight. Tonight is the longest night, the darkest night of the year and it would have been easy to stay home in front of the fire. I know that I was very tempted to do so myself but it is a real privilege to present this lecture, to give this lecture in front of one's peers and family. So I thought I would take a moment to introduce you to some members of my family, some of whom are here tonight. Here's my wonderful mother Prue with my father Jack. Around the time of my birth she sadly died prematurely in 1992 and she would have loved to have been here, as Janet and I have often discussed because we've got sort of similar mothers, that she would put on the dog if she was here tonight. And here's me and my older brother Bill who should be here but he's always, he's legendary in the family for being late. I'm the angelic one and he's the one with the family ears and here's the great architect my father Jack of whom I'm incredibly proud with his biggest direction in Wellington and Jack and the downpipe, that's the outrageously expensive downpipe that he designed for us which nearly brought our marriage to an end and the photo was taken by my dear friend Judy Druck who's in the audience. What else have I got to show you? Here's husband Tony who does not want to be acknowledged, I don't think he's here tonight, oh yes here he is. And much loved, three much loved but rather wayward children plus one of their partners. I've been blessed with encouragement, support and love from all of these people and since 1986 wonderful supportive colleagues who just keep getting better and better, more impressive and more professional every year it seems and here's a photo of them last year. They are the true taonga of this law school. Thank you to you all. In 1978 the UK Royal Commission on Compensation and Civil Liability known as the Pearson Commission had this to say of volunteers and medical research. We think it is wrong that a person who exposes himself to some medical risk in the interests of the community should have to rely on ex-grasha compensation in the event of injury and yet nearly 40 years later that's actually the position that most injured participants in medical research in Australia, New Zealand and the UK find themselves in if they are injured in medical research and because the information about the compensation arrangement in place for the clinical trial that subjects receive in many instances is inadequate it's highly likely that they only discover their financial exposure after they're injured and they make a claim for compensation. So a bit of a roadmap that looks an awful lot and I stand between you and a drink so I hope it won't be too long but first of all I'll explain the difference between biomedical research and ordinary medical care and we'll look at the incidents of research related injury. I'll make the ethical argument in favour of a societal moral obligation to compensate for research related injury and argue that no fault compensation is the best ethical response. Then we'll do a brief survey of the three jurisdictions in relation to both publicly funded that's taxpayer funded clinical trials and commercially funded pharmaceutical funded trials look at the recommended information about the compensation arrangement in place that potential subjects are given in each jurisdiction and finally outline some remedial and reform options but it's important first to appreciate the difference between medical research and ordinary medical care each has very different goals ordinary medical treatment aims to benefit an individual patient the doctor weighs the potential risks against the benefits of an intervention and recommends a tailored regimen are only where the benefits outweigh the risks for that individual in contrast the sole goal of clinical research is to benefit future patients the aim is not to benefit the current research subjects so even in therapeutic research where the medicine is being tested on patients who have the condition that the medicine is being developed to treat and so there's a possibility that they might derive a personal and individual benefit the aim of the clinical trial is not to benefit them if they do benefit that's a secondary and an incidental lucky outcome it's not a game a goal an aim of the research the pharmaceutical trials industry in new zealand is big estimated at 45 million dollars per annum in 2001 and growing the aim is that it should generate 240 50 million dollars per annum by 2020 in 2011 government was concerned that New Zealand had lost its competitive advantage as a good place to carry out clinical trials mainly to Australia and it took various initiatives one of which was streamlining the ethics approval process to improve the environment for conducting clinical trials in New Zealand since 2012 it's estimated that about 50 000 New Zealanders have participated in clinical research and in 2016 about 240 applications were made for ethics approval for intervention studies most for studies funded by pharmaceutical or medical device companies and of course overwhelmingly they are approved societies interests are advanced by ongoing medical research and people's participation in it the greatest benefit is obviously to future patients who suffer from disease or injury through the availability of a constant stream of new and improved medicines which have increased life expectancies improved quality of life and reduced rates of morbidity but the population is a whole benefits from advances in knowledge medical and scientific knowledge even if a particular medicine turns out on balance not to be beneficial and it is not brought to market all new medicines have to be tested for the first time on healthy people after which they're tested on smaller than larger groups of patient volunteers before the medicine can be registered and marketed so these advances in medical treatments come at a cost to a minority of research subjects who suffer research related injury we're all aware of the highly publicized notorious cases of deaths and catastrophic injuries the french bial disaster last year which left one participant brain dead and five others critically ill and then of course the so-called elephant man clinical trial the north park study in 2006 in which six healthy men took a new medicine in a phase one trial and within 12 hours of taking that medicine suffered multi-organ failure and some of them continue to suffer long-term health problems but harm that's never widely publicized is caused to a small number of participants in routine clinical research and so for example in 2012 in New Zealand two men who were participants in separate pharmaceutical company trials suffered serious injury one trial involved a man who was involved in a gout trial who suffered atrial fibrillation days after taking a new gout medicine and to my knowledge he's never worked again the other was involved in an insulin trial testing a new variant of an insulin medicine against an existing medicine and he suffered permanent and very significant neuropathy nerve damage after taking after participating in the trial though there's little recent data on the incidence of research related injury it's claimed to be low in incidence the biggest study is quite an old one 1976 on about 130 000 patients and it showed that the risk associated with non-therapeutic research was estimated to be no greater than that experienced in everyday life i guess that might depend on what you do in your everyday life and that in therapeutic research no greater than that in ordinary medical treatment there are two main opposing views about whether there's an ethical requirement to compensate for research related injury the argument that there's no such obligation proceeds from the principle of autonomy or liberty and it holds that providing subjects have been clearly and accurately informed of the risks of participating in the trial and with full knowledge they've given a voluntary consent to participation their consent constitutes a waiver of any claim for compensation if they're injured but that position i would suggest has been convincingly rebutted for quite some time it's pointed out that disclosure of the risks is not the same as disclosure of a legal right or disclosure of the absence sorry of a legal right to compensation and it doesn't amount to a waiver of compensation the function of informed consent in the in the research setting is merely to authorise research which involves interference with a person's bodily integrity to proceed it doesn't shift the financial burden of injury from researcher to subject the most influential justification for a societal moral obligation to compensate for injured compensate injured research subjects was advanced way back in 1976 by James Childress he argued that because clinical research requires participants to assume a position of risk for the benefit of society and future patients society therefore has a moral obligation to compensate for research related injury and he pointed to these three features giving rise to a societal moral obligation to compensate injured patients i won't read them out but he argued that the moral obligation exists regardless of the possibility that the subject might derive an individual personal benefit from taking the medicine and whatever are subjects are subjective motives for participating because there's uncertainty about which medicine is the best the most beneficial treatment or procedure and the subject still accepts a position of risk for the benefit of society and he included industry sponsored research within the moral obligation because society requires drug testing for licensing and registration purposes there's also a consensus that no fault compensation is the best ethical response to research related injury that it constitutes a special case for compensation without the injured subject having to prove that the researcher or the funder the sponsor was negligent it's well known the poor job that tort law does as a compensation mechanism we've known that since woodhouses powerful report in 1968 particularly in medical negligence cases and tort law is even worse at compensating injured research subjects than it is injured patients and this is for two main reasons there are two main reasons why injured subjects chances of succeeding in a court of law are very limited the most serious obstacle lies improving fault or negligence on behalf of researchers or sponsors when injury occurs it's most often because an unforeseen or an unpredictable risk of the trial product occurs rather than any negligence or departure from the trial protocol by the research team and so participants are likely to experience real difficulty in proving that the harm was reasonably foreseeable because unforeseeable events are to be expected in experimental research the second barrier is proof of the causal link between subjects injury and their participation in the trial this can be a real challenge especially for patient volunteers who have real difficulty in proving that their injury was attributable to the administration of the trial product or some intervention required by the protocol rather than the underlying condition progressing or the comparison medicine a side effect of that and the two New Zealand cases that I talked about both manifest this difficulty both pharmaceutical companies disputed that it was their trial drug which caused the injury it wasn't until some three years later and after getting as they say lawhead up that the man in the gout trial was able to achieve a confidential settlement with the pharmaceutical company and the man in the insulin trial to this day has never received any compensation because the company maintains that his injury was caused was was associated with his underlying diabetes rather than their study than their trial drug this despite ministerial pressure being applied to the company to go to mediation and him also obtaining legal representation so tort law almost always leaves injured research subjects to bear the full financial burden of their injuries alone only no fault compensation will adequately protect them for injuries for which negligence can't be established and so that's why a whole series of blue ribbon national commissions and reports have recommended no fault the and international guidelines similarly most notably the famous Belmont report and also the Pearson report which I referred to earlier so let's move to the survey of the arrangements in place of the of the three jurisdictions to see whether the law in each of these countries measures up to the ethical obligation of no fault compensation in the United Kingdom the law is different in publicly funded that's taxpayer funded research trials and commercially funded trials in publicly funded research trials to be legally entitled to compensation an injured subject would have to go to court and prove a legal claim against an NHS funder or an NHS staff member involved in a trial either in negligence or under their consumer guarantees act which is no mean feat as I indicated in the case of non negligently inflicted harm so that's where an unforeseen side effect of the medicine occurs and causes injury the UK government forbids NHS bodies from offering advanced compensation to subjects or providing indemnities to their staff staff or NHS bodies taking out compensation commercial insurance but they are permitted to offer an ex-gratius system in exceptional circumstances within a delegated limit of 50 000 pounds and so in the UK injured research subjects even healthy volunteers in publicly funded trials either have to establish legal liability or rely on an ex-gratia payment what's the position in pharmaceutical funded trials the pharmaceutical industry in the UK has been permitted to regulate compensation arrangements through a system of voluntary compensation guidelines sanctioned by government so for phase one studies these are on healthy volunteers who do not expect to benefit can't benefit from the medicine the member association of the pharmaceutical industry which is called the association of the British pharmaceutical industry the ABPI they've adopted guidelines that require sponsors to put in place illegally enforceable commitment to pay compensation to injured subjects this is achieved through the terms of the participant information sheet and the consent form these are drafted as a binding contract between the sponsor and the subject there are still some problems with these but they're awful lot better than the compensation guidelines in place for phase two three and four trials if you read these compensation guidelines and i'm reliably informed that most patient volunteers never do you discover that they state that a sponsor's obligation to pay no fault compensation is without legal commitment so it's a moral obligation only it's unenforceable by an injured participant the justification for different treatment of phase one injuries and later phase injuries is that the former are considered to be a special group of research participants they expose themselves to unknown and usually greater risks of injury and they don't they expect no personal benefit and so without a legally binding commitment to compensate them for injury the industry recognise that it would be terribly hard to recruit healthy volunteers drug injuries can be very expensive to compensate and i suggest that it's an unsatisfactory position for an injured patient volunteer that the research sponsor is faced with balancing cost against breaching a legally unenforceable albeit moral undertaking and on some claims you can quite imagine that the sponsoring company or maybe it's overseas head office could well decide that the costs are simply not worth it so coming to the arrangements in this part of the world Australia their national statement on ethical conduct and human research requires that all clinical trials have appropriate compensation but it doesn't specify what this is to consist of the arrangements for publicly funded research are complex because of their federal state system and i won't go into the technical detail but the bottom line is that public sector bodies conducting clinical trials don't typically put in place no fault compensation or provide insurance or indemnity to support that a subject's entitlement compensation would depend on proof of legal liability in pharmaceutical funded clinical trials in australia and new zealand almost identical compensation guidelines to the uk ones for stage two three and four trials are in place with each government's blessing they were adopted in australia in 1994 because the ethics committees there increasingly demanded that sponsors agree to abide by them but they were introduced in new zealand in 1993 for a very different reason in 1992 government in new zealand passed a new statute governing our compensation scheme and one change was to remove personal injury resulting from participation in a pharmaceutical funded trial from acc cover even though participants in public trials taxpayer funded trials continued to have acc cover at the time government government was looking to reduce the costs of funding the scheme that sounds familiar doesn't it and it also reasoned that since medicines which were trialled on new zealanders the profits would be enjoyed by industry it should pay the cost of injuries in their trials so by agreeing to participate in a commercially funded trial a research subject surrenders their right to acc cover and when it was belatedly realized that these participants were financially exposed government and the research medicines industry hurriedly adopted the uk compensation guidelines and they were put in place in 1993 one major and sobering difference to the uk position however is that the compensation guidelines in place in new zealand and australia these versions apply also to injuries in phase one studies so healthy volunteers who are injured so sponsors in the uk we saw accept a legally enforceable compensation obligation but in new zealand and australia for unexplained reasons a sponsors obligation to pay no fault compensation to participants injured in a phase one trial is also without legal commitment even though the british member association the abpi has accepted and it says has said this in writing that it's ethically appropriate to provide legally enforceable compensation to phase one subjects and it's done so since 1970 on occasion industry associations have have reassured the medical profession and ethics committees but not subjects that despite the without legal commitment wording they would pay out if they had agreed in an information sheet to abide by the compensation guidelines we do in reality pay out presumably the reasoning is that it's not just financial but there are reputational interests and a company will want to protect its investment in its trial product but the problem is that we have no way of knowing whether they do pay out ethics committees are not involved in the claims process and they can't monitor where the claims are paid and the amounts and companies guard the fact of any settlements under the compensation guidelines and the details as confidential and commercially sensitive certainly you can imagine the commercial realities when it's so that a company agreed that it should make some payment in an individual case once the injured participant or his or her lawyer finds out that any payment is without legal commitment certainly the negotiating power would shift dramatically in the company's favour after learning about the difficulties that the two New Zealand men faced in receiving compensation New Zealand's national ethics advisory committee or NEAC warned government ministers in 2014 that it was concerned that some companies may be failing to comply with the requirement to pay compensation to at least ACC equivalent standard and in an expeditious manner so what are the compensation arrangements in publicly funded trials in New Zealand as I said these are covered under the ACC scheme under the treatment injury head of cover without the without the claimant having to prove negligence or fault by the sponsor or the researcher certainly they've still got to prove that causative link between injury and participation in the trial and that can be a real challenge but from an injured subject's perspective ACC compensation is overwhelmingly superior to that under the compensation guidelines the key advantage is of course that it's legally enforceable the amounts are fixed clearly stated in the legislation rather than being at the discretion of the pharmaceutical company importantly they include weekly compensation for lost income which is often not provided under the compensation guidelines and in fatal cases a proportion of the weekly compensation is paid to partners and dependents there's a statutory process and time limits by which claims are to be decided and ACC decisions can be appealed to the independent courts there's nothing like this under the compensation guidelines under these the pharmaceutical company is the final decision maker of the claim remember that's a claim to which it's a party with a financial interest so there's a serious potential for bias and so participants in pharmaceutical funded industry trials are significantly disadvantaged in New Zealand compared to those in publicly funded trials they're dependent on a sponsor's voluntary payment of compensation whereas the latter have a legal entitlement to reasonably comprehensive no fault compensation this i would submit is inequitable and discriminatory since once you're injured in a trial it's immaterial to you where the funding came from the taxpayer or the pharmaceutical company your need lies in proper compensation for your injury at that point so all three countries are wanting in the extent to which their law measures up to that ethical requirement of no fault compensation for research related injury subjects are reliant on x scratch a payment or an unenforceable assurance of payment following non negligent injury the exceptions are publicly funded trials in New Zealand and phase one trials in the uk so let's look at the templates for the participant information sheets so this is the information that a potential research subject receives when they're considering whether to enroll in a clinical trial and the peak ethics bodies in each country have templates of recommended information and wording to include in the information sheets so this is the uk one for a pharmaceutical funded phase two three and four trial remember that in these responses obligation is legally unenforceable i bolded the two sentences there this does at least say that any payment would be without legal commitment although it might be hard for a potential participant to reconcile the first bolded sentence and the second bolded sentence here's the australian health ethics committee committee's recommended wording for a commercially funded trial i've bolded the sentence the purely voluntary nature of the obligation to pay no fault compensation could be made more explicit i would suggest using the words without legal commitment would would be as much clearer it could well be that a reasonable person contemplating enrolling in the trial might interpret that sentence as depending on whether the terms of the compensation guidelines apply to their case rather than the compensation guideline the obligation being voluntary but the new zealand health ethics committee's recommended wording is far and away the worst offender the overall message here is that compensate you wouldn't you don't get a cc compensation but that compensation would be available from the study sponsor instead of a cc compensation if something was to go wrong um there's nothing here to put a subject on notice that a sponsor's obligation is a moral one only that it's without legal commitment which i suggest if you just read that would come as a shock to you if you were injured and went looking for compensation there's even a suggestion in the last sentence that a subject unhappy with the amount of compensation that a pharmaceutical company was prepared to give to you um you could go to court and authoritatively challenge the amount of compensation and a court could make a legal ruling determining the appropriate amount of compensation which of course is totally incorrect um subject to a a wee argument that i'll come to in a minute the guidelines the compensation guidelines aren't named and they're not given to subjects unless they ask for them so i would suggest given that those words without legal commitment are in the compensation guidelines and they are critical for a participant's legal rights they should get a copy and it should be put in front of their eyes and explain to them the chairs of the health the ethics committees in new zealand have written to me to tell me that this template is being revised um to better inform participants that the obligation is voluntary and not enforceable and minister peter dun has told me that this is expected to be completed by the end of september so they don't appear to be in any hurry at the very least i would suggest that if ethics committees continue to approve research on the basis of the compensation guidelines they must insist that researchers and sponsors spell out accurately and in the clearest of terms a subject's lack of any legal right to no fault compensation in the event they're injured so that the issue becomes part of their overall informed consent this would merely ensure that people would go into trials with their eyes open of course and it may well negatively impact on recruitment it would do nothing to address the underlying problem that they've got no legal right to no fault compensation so what responses and options are available to try to bring the legal requirement up to match the ethical requirement the lawyers in this audience will have been whispering to themselves that there must surely be scope for an injured participant to argue that a contract exists between the subject and the sponsor based on the information sheet and the the signed consent form despite the absence of legal commitment wording of the guidelines peter watts is looking incredibly um a scant at this he's told me that he doesn't think this argument holds any water at all but we shall see after all some participants are paid to participate the the usual legal principle is that courts accept that agreements which are stated to be binding in honour only are not legally binding as contracts because the parties don't have an intention to create legally binding relations but where the effect of a clause has been misrepresented the clause excluding legal liability has been misrepresented it won't operate even if it's been signed by a party that it is sought to be bound by it and i would suggest that at the moment the standard text in the new zealand template information sheet doesn't just omit those words without legal commitment it actually wrongly and misleadingly suggests that compensation enforceable by a court would be in place instead of a cc cover if something were to go wrong and so i suggest that injured subjects may have a cause of action in contract or the equitable principal promisory estoppel for a remedy which would have the effect of enforcing a sponsor's obligation to pay no fault compensation it wouldn't be a straightforward claim you'd have to convince a court that the subject actually relied on the explanation in the information sheet and they wouldn't have entered the trial if they had no in the true position the second option are neax ethical guidance and the operating procedures in place put a duty on ethics committees to check that acc equivalent compensation is in place for a commercially funded trial in place of acc cover since research can't proceed without ethics approval it's within the power of ethics committees to make their approval of research conditional on them being satisfied that illegally enforceable acc equivalent compensation arrangement is in place and so i suggest that ethics committees should be fully prepared especially where the risks of a trial are more than negligible to withhold approval of research unless they're satisfied that there's a legally enforceable compensation arrangement in place governments guilty of speaking out of both sides of its mouth on the one hand it wants to encourage the industry and it's put ethics committees under very real pressure to approve trials within very short time frames but on the other hand ethics committees can be very sure that if anything goes wrong it's they who will be blamed for failing to protect patients in response to neax concern that i referred to earlier sounded to ministers uh government officials had this to say to the ministers ethics committees shouldn't be approving trials unless they're satisfied appropriate compensation arrangements have been made the regulatory framework may not be sufficiently robust to ensure the welfare of participants and could be reviewed the third option it's submitted that the most ethically defensible and effective reform option for compensating for research related injury is a no fault compensation scheme operating outside the tort system in new zealand the answer seems pretty obvious and straightforward to achieve to extend a cc cover to cover the small group of research participants in commercially funded trials by removing their exclusion from a cc cover so that they're treated equally with all other research participants in new zealand so far government ministers have been unpersuaded of the merits of this suggestion in the uk and australia they don't have a state funded compensation scheme and so such a reform option would be much more difficult to achieve but a scheme could operate outside the tort system via a private fund administered by a body such as a board and financed by those who benefit from biomedical research there's certainly a valid concern that if the pharmaceutical industry is able to shift its costs of compensating for injuries onto the compensation scheme and it doesn't have to internalise those costs in its financial risk benefit calculus this would blunt incentives on them to conduct safe studies would new zealand be targeted by pharmaceutical companies seeking to conduct questionable trials this is the key policy reason officials government officials advised ministers against extending a cc cover to participants injured in commercially funded trials which ministers accepted but i suggest that there are very effective means alternative means of maintaining appropriate levels of deterrence on the pharmaceutical industry all companies are conducting trials in new zealand are required to have clinical trials insurance if acc cover was extended to industry trials pharmaceutical companies would be simply exchanging an insurance premium for a contribution to the acc scheme via payment of a levy levy rates could be calculated according to a sponsor's safety record and its claims experience as a means of achieving greater deterrence and concerns about under deterrence could also be addressed by giving acc a statutory right of subrogation so that it could stand in the shoes of the injured claimant participant and pursue in the public interest any legal claim that the subject would have had against the commercial sponsor including for example for punitive damages in egregious cases and so in conclusion it's my submission to you this evening that the ethical corollary of the fact that society is the ultimate beneficiary of its members participation in medical research is that society as a whole should bear the costs of participant injuries through the establishment of a central no fault compensation fund in this country we are very fortunate that a scheme already exists the only serious inequity being that it doesn't cover subjects injured in pharmaceutical funded clinical trials thank you for your kind attention stay there so i can praise you and humiliate you when asked to say some words of thanks tonight i insisted on seeing joe's cv she and i started here 30 years ago so i know a lot about joe but she's the classic kiwi understaters so i thought it was i should see her cv and it is a remarkable cv and i the stout shield for instance that janet mentioned i was unaware of her senior scholar as a student but all through life she's been a great achiever and a real trojan when it comes to service both to the university and the community she's not very tolerant of malingoras at the faculty or elsewhere but where where there's genuine need joe will be there she's an incredibly kind person and a doer she's been involved in the community as we've heard some of these things over 20 or no about 20 years of ministerial appointments medical practitioners disciplinary committee national committee on health and disability support services ethics committee she's she's been played a brave role in relation to the cart right matter and she showed the bravery again tonight i think in in the talk we've heard it sounds to me a bit like an economic race to the bottoms been going on and it's time it was straightened out and i think we should all be very grateful uh for for your bringing that to our attention she's been a very popular teacher in the faculty across a range of subjects including key compulsory subjects torts which is just pan tonight of course and she's had a superb research output which is of course a key factor in an appointment to a chair she's performed nearly every function within the faculty including deputy dean and a short spell is acting day so in short you know she's what more could one want to an academic colleague superb academic record a scholar and a contributor to administration she's also a person of unimpeachable integrity rather too much information sometimes but on top of her formal contributions to the faculty one of one of her greatest contributions to those around her has been her sense of humour some of which we've heard tonight she's always making us laugh both intentionally and unintentionally her intentional humour at the expense of people such as i was thinking today yes well collie rick bigwood is like the humour of tony um unrepeatable i'm afraid um as for her unintentional uh humor i made a note that she and tony do a lot of fishing down at fonga power but joe is very good with the gaff back in Auckland as well anyway we've we've had a very interesting and typically intelligent talk tonight and i'm very happy therefore to ask you to join me in rejoicing with joe's wonderful family in her appointment as professor and congratulating her again