Bennett DavidNATIONAL ANIMAL IDENTIFICATION AND TRACING AMENDMENT BILL (NO 2)In CommitteePart 1 Amendments to principal ActHon DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): Thank you Madam Chair. This is the second bill coming through from the Primary Production Committee tonight. There are two big issues that I want to focus on in this bill. One is to do with clarifying ownership of core data in the bill and the second one is around the tagging of animals and the requirements on transporters that would be transporting those animals. They were the two big changes that came out of the select committee.Now first of all is the ownership of core data. So what happened in this bill is that we had a situation where there was a very amicable and well-addressed process of communication and discussion between the Minister and officials and the sector and that had gone on for a number of months. To all intents and purposes everybody thought that that was progressing well. To give you some context the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) legislation is something that will be an ongoing process of reform. Nobody's ever said that it would be done in one go and would be perfect and the M. bovis outbreak really showed some deficiencies in the system that needed to be changed. I congratulate the Minister for making those changes; they are effectively what were needed to beef up the system. Now there's still a lot more to be done in that system. I'm sure the Minister in future iterations of this bill will do more as well to do that.But in that discussion that he had with the sector not once did he raise the issue of taking ownership of the data. And then when the bill came before this House suddenly there was a clause in there saying that the data would be now owned by the Government. Now that might have been an attempt by the Minister to clarify the position if you were very gracious. It may have been an attempt by the Minister to overstep his mark which seems to be more likely. But whatever happened in between to make the Minister do that the Minister has been found out. In select committee it become obvious that there were some issues around data and ownership of that data.There are two things that should be considered. The first is that the database in which that data is held was sold to the industry bodies some years ago. When that database was sold the contract was effectively silent on the ownership of data. Now the industry bodies necessarily expected that they would have ownership of the data because they bought the database. The Minister argued for inclusion of this clause that the Government actually still owned the data in the past in the present and in the future. That was challenged by submitters in the select committee.As a committee we got a legal opinion from Crown Law. That legal opinion effectively said that the Minister was out of line and that the Minister couldn't own the data. And the reason would have been that simply as soon as the database was sold the Minister can't reasonably legally say that he or the Government owns any future data going into that database. And so there was a major backdown by the Government parties where they had to take out that clause.Now if you look at the commentary of the bill it will say that this means that it is silent on who has ownership of the data. Effectively it is more than that. For the official record the legal advice the Crown would have received in this situation would have been that they don't have a strong case and that they can't contest that ownership of data in the future. I believe that it goes beyond being silent; it actually shows a major backdown by the Government and that reflects a failure of the Government to actually have the legal status to do what it was trying to do in this bill. So that's the first big issue.The second big issue in this bill is around the transporting companies. So this bill sought to transfer liability on to the transporting companies; basically your trucking company that picked up the stock. They would then have a responsibility for any livestock that were not tagged appropriately. Now as you can imagine it's very difficult for many of those transport operators to effectively work. They sometimes work in the darkness of night and early morning and sometimes it's very difficult to determine whether an animal is tagged or what degree of tagging there is on that animal.So the transporting companies came to the select committee and sought refuge around that clause. It was a battle to get the Government parties to do that. They were reluctant. Members of the Government parties felt that it was a responsibility that could be sheeted home to the transport companies. It was only due to the strength of the National Party Opposition and the continual pushing that we did with officials that we actually got that change which is a reasonable change. Now whenever anyone has to fill in the declaration forms around the animals that are leaving their property there will be a new section that will be included basically giving an indemnity to the trucking companies that the farmer has tagged the animals appropriately. That's what you would expect as they are the farmer's stock and not the responsibility of the trucking companies. But as I said it was quite a difficult process to get the Government parties to look at that in a reasonable manner. It took them some time to understand what it actually meant. They were quite happy just to go along with a piece of legislation even though it was going to be detrimental to many of those in the transport sector that shouldn't have had that responsibility put on them in the first place.So there were two wins in this bill for the Opposition which is rare when you're an Opposition in Parliament. Effectively this now makes this a bill that's worthy to be supported. Before it would have been a bill that would not have been worthy to have had support in this House but because of the strength of the Opposition parties we retained ownership of core data within the farming sector not within the Government hands and we made sure that the trucking companies weren't unreasonably penalised by decisions that would have been made out of Wellington that weren't practical and would have meant that those companies would have taken responsibility for something that was not in their ambit. So this is a definite win for the Opposition in this case. It's a bill that we will support and with the support of all the House I know it will go through. Thank you Madam Chair.