Tirikatene RinoRINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Well thank you Madam Speaker. I am indeed proud to stand in support of this outstanding bill at its first reading. I want to congratulate our Minister of Agriculture the Hon Damien O'Connor for his leadership in actually fronting up to the hard issues that are confronting our dairy industry and actually putting in place a very sound and sensible bill which will ensure the future prosperity of our dairy industry. So I want to acknowledge the Minister and I want to acknowledge all the efforts of our coalition Government in bringing this bill to the House because this—forget about the doom and gloom that has been spouted from the other side this Government stands by our dairy industry. We want to support our number one export dairy—the prosperity and the wealth that it creates for our country. The Dairy Industry Restructuring Act (DIRA) needs updating and it's taken nearly 20 years for this to happen. We've heard a lot of talk tonight about how the shackles should be unlocked or freed and how the training wheels need to be taken off. Well the National Party was in Government for what some nine-odd years of Fonterra's existence? Maybe even longer and did nothing. But on this side we are fronting up. We are. We are listening to the dairy sector and we are providing the leadership to help provide that stability and certainty for Fonterra into the future. We know it's challenging times; this isn't 2001 when 96 percent of farm dairy supply—it's far from that today but 80 percent is still a sizeable chunk of the total milk production of our nation. There do need to be some tweaks to the overall DIRA requirements. There are risks and there are also some constraints that need to be maybe loosened and some that might need to be tightened. That's what we're doing with this bill. We need to provide leadership for Fonterra; it is our number one exporter. But this bill or the DIRA legislation is not the reason for the woes which Fonterra is facing at the moment. We know it's a highly competitive international market that it competes in. We know that management has made some very poor decisions in terms of its international investments which it had to write down significantly in this year's results. We know that there are ongoing issues in our major markets with tariff and trade wars which are ongoing right as we speak. So there are really big challenges which our dairy sector is facing. Thank goodness for our Minister and the leadership that he is showing in bringing this bill to the House. We need to ensure that those requirements that are in place in the existing bill—certainly some of them are outdated; some of them need to be loosened up. The entry and exit requirements—there is scope for Fonterra to have an increased say in terms of flexibility to turn away supply to also turn away new entrants. So this isn't—this bill hasn't just been plucked out of the air. There has been a comprehensive review that underpins this piece of legislation and the regulations which go with it. That has been going on with industry participants and with experts for close to a year. Further to that there was a Commerce Commission report which was the forerunner to the review which also provided the platform which this bill has now manifested. These are very sensible changes that we are making to the DIRA legislation. It's actually going to help provide a solid foundation for Fonterra. We know that there are new entrants in the market place—I welcome the addition of the likes of Miraka our 100 percent - owned Māori dairy-processer. There is a place for increased players in the dairy sector but we must also ensure that our number one company is supported and that's what this bill does. We want to ensure that our farm suppliers the owners of Fonterra the consumers of New Zealand and also our international markets—because it's our reputation that's on the line everyday with our flagship company. We want to ensure that that has the support and that's why I support this bill. Kia ora tātou.