Kuriger Barbara; Rurawhe AdrianBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. Listening to the speech that Minister Whaitiri has just made she said that this would be very small when it comes to the agriculture sector. But it is a big cost for those people who take part in the live export industry. Also I picked up on the fact that the Minister said it was really hard to estimate the number of farmers who do it. Now before I go on to that I just wanted to make mention of the people who died on the boat because often we see that everyone talks about this being an animal welfare tragedy and of course many cattle died on that boat and it was a tragedy that that boat obviously wasn't up to spec and went somewhere that it shouldn't go. As a result of that over 40 people actually lost their lives on that boat too and it's something that's very seldom ever mentioned. It sort of reminds me that you know we have a car accident but we don't ban every car. You know there's tragedies from time to time but it doesn't mean to say we stop doing it because it happens to one boat. Even reading in here the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) didn't actually count this in their animal welfare figure or their animal death stats because it was actually a transport and a boat-sinking episode not an animal welfare episode. Look it does appear that there was something absolutely not right about the Gulf Livestock 1 ship that sank and the decisions that some people made with that ship. I've got a press release here that came out of Australia: It has been 12 months since the live export ship sank off the Japanese coast but a number of details about the tragedy remain a mystery. … It's understood there was an inquiry and it's been concluded but for whatever reason the outcome has not been made publicly available and that's pretty disappointing." So the Australian Government is actually still trying to get their hands on the information around that inquiry because it didn't happen in their waters. Look I've been visiting people who partake in live exports and their ships and their practices look nothing like what we have seen and the conditions that we've seen on that boat. So I question whether we need to take this giant step to do this and so do my colleagues in National. The Ministry for Primary Industries in September 2020 announced an independent review and launched into the animal welfare assurances for safe transport of livestock by sea. It made a number of recommendations including ongoing review of rules guidance and regulations and you can see that in Part 4 of the review—and we don't have time to go into the whole review tonight. But we in National believe that this bill is a knee-jerk reaction to the tragedy of one ship sinking. Export mortality rates are typically about 0.1 percent and it does contribute about $261 million to the economy and I know that there are a range of views around this practice. But when it's done well it's actually really—for someone who is exporting animals or any product to the value that some of these animals are you don't want your product to turn up at the other end not in a good shape because you wouldn't be in the business for very long anyway and many of these people take a huge pride in what they do. If the industry is to be phased out it should be due to changing market demand not to a Government edict based on one event. So in 2020 the mortality rate of livestock was 0.12 percent and in 2019 the mortality rate for livestock was 0.08 percent and as I've said before MPI didn't count that. That was a transport misadventure and they didn't count that in the stats. So the regulatory impact statement says that there are two approaches that the Government could have taken to this to respond to this tragedy. The first would be to "allow trade to continue but with stronger regulations through maintaining strong animal welfare standards and enhancing New Zealand's long-term trade relationships." and this is the approach that National agrees with. The second was to "ban the export of livestock" and this is what this bill is about tonight which is why National is opposing this. There is currently no ban on other types of livestock and it's only the ones that are mentioned in this bill. All animals undergo a pre-departure check and I visited some people who are in the livestock export trade recently. They always keep extra days of feed on hand for these animals just in case they come across a storm like the one that this boat should never have gone into. So I say again that nobody's going to want to export animals that don't turn up in good shape. But the Minister of Agriculture Damien O'Connor said that the Government's decision was about animal welfare and protecting and positioning New Zealand's reputation. What happened on this ship was not a New Zealand situation and we can actually put regulations in and we can take control over what happens within our own country. So even if it could be proven that the incident did not involve New Zealand animals the Minister thinks that the public may conclude that our animals could face a similar outcome. But why? We don't have too many people going on cruise ships at the moment. I've done a few cruises in my life and actually a year before that captain caught the attention of his girlfriend over in Italy and that boat tipped over I was on the sister ship of that ship a year before and it was fine. So we react to one thing which isn't always necessary. We don't have to ban everything because of one incident. Look I'm dealing with another bill at the moment which is the decommissioning one on the gas. You have one incident and everybody else is bad and everything seems to need to be banned under the edict of this Government. So for the policy to be given effect by this bill—and this is from the regulatory impact statement—is there analysis available on the size of the potential costs and benefits and the answer is yes; and (b) the potential for any group of persons to suffer a substantial unavoidable loss of income or wealth and the statement says that the analysis noted "rural communities where livestock exports are a source of income would suffer economic losses. This would likely have flow on effects to wider primary industry businesses related to the trade e.g. vet services transport companies stock handlers etc." Exporters and related businesses would suffer grave economic losses that would likely result in their businesses ceasing to operate. Now animal exports have done and can be done safely and there were a number of conditions that the Ministry for Primary Industries put in when they went through like having focused maritime inspection of livestock carrier ships entering New Zealand to transport livestock by Maritime New Zealand as a safeguard; restricting stock density on vessels to 90 percent of the current limits; increasing requirements for voyage recording including daily vet reports during voyages; and increasing minimum fodder as I said before. So who would really want their livestock to turn up overseas in less than a good state because it's not going to be an export business for very long? I just want people to know that hopefully during the select committee process we will be able to have time to hear all the arguments and look at what the general live animal export official assurance programme in this country by the Ministry for Primary Industries actually does. I just want people to know tonight that the Ministry for Primary Industries have put some extra conditions on exporting livestock. It was actually the Government that decided to make the move to ban this approach and that is why National is opposing this. But we will work constructively at the select committee and in the last bill we talked about tonight we managed to make some changes at select committee. So here's hoping. DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired."