O'Connor Damien: Food Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Food Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 14 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17865. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): Part 4 of the Food Bill relates to the enforcement agencies the territorial local authorities and the other organisations that will be expected to—and obliged to now of course—go out and ensure that the systems we are putting in place here will be met for the benefit of mainly local consumers I guess so that those people buying and selling food around the food markets farmers’ markets and other places can deliver safe food to consumers. We do not want to belittle in any way the importance of this. There was much debate around the requirement for monitoring as we said before the relative risk relating to the provision of food and the sale of it to people.Farmers’ markets are a relatively new evolution in food sales. They are certainly far more significant now than they were when the review of these Acts was first initiated back in the early 2000s under the Hon Annette King. Things like food markets were very low key. Now thankfully they are a far larger part of the whole food supply chain and if we here had our way they would be far greater. We would remove from the two big supermarket chains the absolute and total dominance that they have in the supply of food to Kiwis up and down this country. An interesting aside I must say is that a study out of Otago University said that if people purchased their fruit and vegetables from farmers’ markets rather than buying them from the supermarket chains they would save $2500 a year on average. That is something I would like to crow from therooftops and I am doing that today to promote the farmers’ markets because it is about the only way that we will keep the supermarkets honest.We are now dealing with Part 4 of the bill. Again I guess it goes through a whole lot of technical requirements such as the withdrawal of recognition and the ability of as I say territorial authorities to come in. At the moment of course they have pretty much sole charge of local food outlets in terms of restaurants takeaway bars and all the rest of it. There are changing oversight requirements for them but in the end they will still have to do a lot of the front-line work. But of course it will be checking different requirements that are related to food safety plans and to general provisions laid out in the bill here.The cost recovery provisions were something that the Primary Production Committee did focus on in spite of my comment earlier to the Minister for Food Safety that her focus and that of the National Government might have been just on cost savings which is kind of common. We were looking at taking a balanced approach to cost which could have been incurred on small businesses unnecessarily and I think we have got that balance about right. I mean we do of course go through in fine detail the penalties the fees and the charges—all of those particular provisions here. I am not going to go and quote from the bill because I think it would probably bore people to tears but there are not too many things in here that we have not thought of keeping in mind that the cost of compliance is not over the top.The offences are clearly in keeping with the risk and the threat to public health but we run right through things like offences involving intentionally hindering or obstructing officials. There was of course the ability for people and officials to enter without warrants which is a highly emotional provision in many pieces of legislation. Officials can get a bit overzealous and if they have the ability to rush in and investigate take food off the shelves and take it away without warrant then that is a significant power that needs cautious oversight. I hope—and I do believe—that the committee has got it about right. We did not spend too much time reviewing these particular provisions in the second round and in the Supplementary Order Paper that the Minister put forward Supplementary Order Paper 278 but we believe that we have got it about right.