Bennett DavidHon DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): Thank you Mr Speaker. I just want to follow the other previous speakers and just congratulate the Minister for bringing this forward and also those like Doug Voss that have been advocates for reform in this area for many many years and will be able to see that coming to fruition now. That's great news for them. When I was the Minister for Food Safety we had this issue arise. The nuts and bolts of it is that basically in New Zealand we don't have an international organic standard where you can say if it's organic food or organically produced food and could actually verify that and say You can have confidence as a consumer in that product as being organic to that level." Now that's not saying that organic produce food isn't done under organic mechanisms. There is a lot of auditing and procedure that goes into place. I've got an organic dairy farm so we go through that auditing process each year and that's a long process as well. But it actually is part of what is needed actually across the whole sector to give confidence in overseas markets that everything coming out of New Zealand will have the necessary strength to it so that people can rely on their purchasing decisions. This is sort of driven out of what's been happening overseas as well. New Zealand isn't a leader in this space at all. This has been something that has happened in many other countries as they worked towards a more consistent approach. New Zealand was slow I guess to follow in that area and that's why it is good to see this bill coming through to tidy that up so that New Zealand is up to speed with other countries in giving some uniformity to the organic sector. Organics is not easy. We had Landcorp come to our Primary Production Committee and they indicated that they'd had probably a 30 percent reduction in production on those farms that were organic and they were transferring them through and they're getting better results now as the technology and their understanding of it gets better. But you know this is not an easy process for anybody to go through and it's a very delicate process as well for organic farming in the sense that if you have a shock to the system like a drought it can often mean that people lose that organic status because they have to break those rules of organic farming. So it is a very difficult area. It's easy for the people in this House and in the wider community to say that we should all become organic farmers and that's the future of New Zealand agriculture. But the reality is somewhat more difficult when you look at the scale you have to do that on for production and also the risk that is involved in that enterprise compared with traditional farming methods. In saying that though we all recognise that New Zealand has to go further up the value chain and this is part of that process to make sure that we have that support there for people to make those kinds of transitions in their businesses to actually take advantage of potential opportunity. But that's another risk in that you might not actually get paid that much more if anything. So it is a difficult area.The bill itself is looking particularly good apart from it has a large requirement that the Minister dictates the approval mechanisms for organic certification effectively. There are a couple of parts in the bill where that happens and the National Party will be looking at that during the select committee process. We don't want to make sure that the Minister has too much power in that authorisation role. I think that it is better to devolve to the industries and to industry-type bodies. If you look at one of the major industry-type bodies you've got out there at the moment it would be AsureQuality a New Zealand State-owned enterprise. It does a fantastic job in New Zealand and is a very profitable business as we saw come through the select committee. I would challenge something like AsureQuality to actually have a role in facilitating the transfer of farmers into organics or whatever they have to do to meet more environmentally conscious requirements. That auditing process that's going to be on every farm needs to be in a cost-effective manner so that we can encourage people to actually take those transitional changes. I think if we just use AsureQuality as a profit-making business as it has been in the past it could have a delaying effect on the transfer of skills and the development of our rural economies. I think there's another role for Government: rather than just this legislation but also for it to look at how that legislation is actually enforced and the mechanism to do that to make it possible for people to make those transitions and to meet the higher environmental obligations that will no doubt come on all producers over time. So this is a good start. I congratulate the Minister for getting it to the House. You know it puts us on a somewhat similar footing with overseas approaches but we are not a world leader in any sense of the imagination. We're behind the eight ball in this and that was something that was good to see actually coming through. But we also need to be very mindful that we don't give too much power to the Minister in the direction of it and we enable enterprise business and organisations that will develop a much stronger mechanism and take into account what can be done in the best interests of farming to take a more active role than the Minister's role in this bill as it stands. So we look forward to some changes in that area as we go through the committee stage but in the essence of getting New Zealand into the 21st century I guess this is a good start."