Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. I was waiting for the Minister for Primary Industries to respond to the invitation by my colleague Richard Prosser to comment. He obviously was not going to do that. I am not a member of the Primary Production Committee but did sit in on it for the review of the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). As the chair of the Primary Production Committee noted MPI is a major agency. It has got more than 2400 people across New Zealand and it had revenue of $458 million in 2015-16. In my comments I will focus both on agriculture and fisheries.Farming is one of our most important activities. It is responsible for 77 percent of our merchandise exports and yet in the primary sector in its oversight of MPI this Government has been as tired as it has in every other sector. It has missed a lot of opportunities and it has failed to implement the new initiatives that are needed. It is just doing the bare minimum that it needs to do to get it through to the next media cycle.One of MPI's desired outcomes is that the primary sector is resilient to adverse climatic events. The primary sector has obviously got much more to lose than many other sectors of the economy from catastrophic climate change and that is because it relies on a stable climate. Weather is changeable but where you have an unstable climate there is an increased likelihood of drought increased and more intense storm events a greater risk of severe fire more tropical cyclones tracking south to New Zealand and a greater risk of pests and weeds spreading into areas where they are not currently found. We know that the costs of this are huge. Just in June 2015 when those storms hit the Taranaki Whanganui and Rangitīkei areas that cost farmers there over $270 million. Where you have got droughts that puts enormous stress on farmers having to get rid of stock often at the worst and least profitable time.So climate change is a major threat to the stability of the primary sector but the National Government fails to realise the need for urgent action. In MPI's annual report for 2015-16 there is only one progress indicator in relation to climate and that is reducing greenhouse gas emissions per unit of production. There is no indicator about bringing down agricultural emissions generally. It has certainly been the case that because of the increase in production—and now I notice Government members are saying Well it's not our aim to double primary exports;" which is what it has been saying "the aim is to double the value rather than the volume." That is not what we have heard previously.So when we have had a major increase in agricultural production in the last 15 or so years we have also seen our agricultural emissions increase quite significantly. So while that progress indicator is showing that the rate of increase per unit of production has slowed because of efficiencies in the sector it is still going up. It is MPI that is responsible with the Ministry for the Environment for the implementation of the emissions trading scheme (ETS). When in the select committee we asked whether MPI had provided any advice to the Minister about including agriculture in the emissions trading scheme so that it would have to take account of its greenhouse gas emissions the answer we got was that there were discussions but they were confidential.The National Government has explicitly ruled out including agriculture in the ETS. It excluded it from the review and all we are seeing is an investment in research through the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases and through the Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change Plan of Action with a couple of million dollars in there. The National Government seems to be assuming as a former Prime Minister did that science is going to provide some magic bullet to reduce emissions: a methane vaccine low-emission animal feed or improved breeding that reduces the ruminant emissions.That is doing a disservice to farmers because it is not providing a signal that they need and we need to start having a discussion now about how and when farmers should be exposed to an economic instrument to an emissions price so that they can start to work out what changes in land use and land management and agricultural practice are needed to bring emissions down. There seems to be the assumption by this Government that farmers are unable to reduce their level of emissions. That assumption is wrong because there is a growing body of research and practice that shows that farm profits can be maintained or even increased with fewer animals. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment in her 2016 report on biological gas emissions highlighted Lake View Farm near Hamilton which in 2009 had 530 cows. It reduced that to 350 by 2014 it cut its greenhouse gas emissions it cut its nitrate leaching and it increased its profitability.We have got Landcorp our largest farmer. It has got a goal of being carbon-neutral within a decade and it—as the select committee heard—is diversifying into sheep milk and into more forestry as part of its push to reduce emissions. Yet by failing to bring agriculture within the ETS the Government is simply kicking it down the road for future generations and it means that agriculture is not getting the same price signals as the rest of the economy and that is amounting to really an implicit subsidy for the sector. The Greens in Government would ensure that there was a price signal for agriculture and that it did come within the ETS because we want to lead on climate because New Zealanders want the Government to do more to protect our climate.Just going on to fisheries—another major part of MPI's responsibilities is to ensure that New Zealand fisheries are sustainably managed in accordance with our legislation in the Fisheries Act. This is a really important responsibility particularly given the popularity of recreational fishing. But 2015-16 has been a pretty dire year for the Ministry for Primary Industries and its Minister in terms of fisheries. There are big questions over the integrity and independence of fisheries management in New Zealand and the over-reliance on the industry to monitor itself so there have been pretty major dents in the claims that the quota system is world leading.We saw in May last year a major report by academics from three universities that showed that our commercial fishing vessels were dumping around 20 percent of their catch on average and that foreign-flag vessels were dumping around 50 percent of their catch. That means that the amount of fish that is reported internationally as having been caught in New Zealand's waters is actually substantially larger than the statistics going through to international agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization. The dumping is occurring because it is often small fish which have a lesser value in the market or the fish are under the minimum size or the fisher has no quota. So what did MPI do? It went into denial mode. It rubbished a comprehensive independent report from leading universities but it provided no evidence to the contrary that that dumping was not happening.Then of course we had the Heron investigation into Operation Achilles and Operation Hippocamp—two investigations that showed that fishers in the trawl and set-net fisheries were dumping catch overboard near Timaru and Ōāmaru—and MPI had clear evidence that substantial dumping was occurring but it did not prosecute. The Queen's Counsel Michael Heron found that that decision was flawed. MPI says it is reviewing its fisheries compliance functions with the aim of providing clearer national leadership but we have yet to see evidence of that. There are 30000 inspections of recreational fishers each year and MPI is really proud of that and that needs to happen but we have not seen the same focus on ensuring that the commercial fishing industry complies with its legal responsibilities not to dump.We also have an issue around at least 11 fish stocks being below the hard limit in terms of their biomass—that is a euphemism for the fact that the stock has been overfished and has collapsed—and we need an urgent plan to rebuild. As Meka Whaitiri mentioned the investment in research has been static at around $22 million. This is a $1.8 billion industry that supports hundreds of jobs and yet under this Government we spend only $22 million annually on the fisheries research needed to better understand the ocean ecosystem fish stocks and everything else that is required to ensure that fisheries management is sustainable. That is typical of this Government. It is failing to invest in protecting the natural systems that are the basis of major industries like fisheries and agriculture."