Fitzsimons Jeanette: New Organisms and Other Matters Bill — In Committee 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: New Organisms and Other Matters Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:611;Page:8863] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Part 1 which sets the date for the bill to come into force is the reason I cannot agree with Brian Donnelly that this bill is not about the lifting of the moratorium and does not provide for the lifting of the moratorium. I have to admit that at first I was wrong on this. Some months ago I went around the country trying to explain to New Zealanders that this bill was not the bill that lifts the moratorium that that happened last year and that this bill was about putting conditions in place. Then when I thought about it carefully I realised that I was wrong. This is the bill that not in law but in practice lifts the moratorium because without this bill no applications for release will be approved. Under the current law only applications for full release can be approved a buffer zone cannot be set a code of practice cannot be required monitoring cannot be required and no conditions at all can be required to protect the neighbours of the crop. There will be no approvals under the law as it stands. So if this bill does not go through even I could accept the lifting of the moratorium—how about that! I know that in practice there would be no releases and our objective has always been to prevent release into the environment. 
We have all had some letters from members of the community who are pleading with us to keep the moratorium in force by amending this bill. The National Beekeepers Association has outlined very carefully its concerns that bees cannot be stopped from flying where they are meant to fly and cannot be stopped from picking up pollen and it is really concerned that the geographic information system whereby bee-keepers are supposed to get their information then go to all the trouble of moving their hives somewhere else only to find that somebody then grows a crop in the next paddock is a completely impractical way to observe the recommendation of the royal commission that a strategy should be in place to protect bee-keepers. We have had letters from the Soil and Health Association Organic Farm New Zealand and from the Bio Dynamic Farming and Gardening Association setting out in detail their reasons that the legislation will affect them very badly. 
We have had a letter from the Cystic Fibrosis Association stating that sound science saves lives but not offering a single shred of evidence for what it is talking about. The association was asking for the moratorium to be lifted but it did not give us any evidence research or argument. 
Had I been able to speak to the title debate I would have suggested that perhaps the bill should be called the “Regulatory System for Totally Hypothetical Things That Do Not Exist Yet Bill”. In fact there are no GM crops that offer any benefits to the consumer or to the New Zealand economy. They are at least 5 years away and we are setting up a regulatory system in this bill for things that do not yet exist. That is leading 68 percent of New Zealanders our big food exporters and everybody else I talk to in the media and everywhere else to ask what the hurry is and why we do not wait. For that reason I invite members to support the amendment from my colleague Mr Ian Ewen-Street that simply changes the date to 5 years hence which will do us fine. 
However the Government has been so keen to see the moratorium expire that it has legislated to do it twice. A clause that was inserted in the bill at the last minute that was not even in the officials’ report back to the committee and that I discovered only after the committee had deliberated provides for Part 5A of the Act as inserted last year to be repealed. New clause 39A provides for that part to be repealed when in fact it already has an expiry clause in it. So we are repealing it twice—so determined and so anxious is the Government that not a shred not a skerrick of moratorium could possibly remain after 29 October. That is a sign of true desperation. 
There is no need for clause 2. There is no need for this bill. The bill would be OK if we put it on hold for 5 years if we passed it with a 2008 date for it to come into force and had 5 years to think about the amendments that we might need to pass before it actually happened.