Walker HamishHAMISH WALKER (National—Clutha-Southland): We all know the introduction of pests and disease into New Zealand carries a huge amount of risk especially if we get some unwanted bugs or diseases past the border. You only need to look at what's happening currently. You've got infectious bronchitis virus which is a chicken disease. It's affected two chicken farms in Otago. Currently the exports of chickens to Australia have been stopped because of this. Basically once you have one farm in New Zealand that tested positive for the disease it affects our exports greatly.You only need to look at Mycoplasma bovis: it hit the South Canterbury North Otago region also the Southland region hard not just the financial costs which will cost the Government and the industry close to a billion dollars but the emotional costs the emotional fallout. You know you've got young children seeing calves getting loaded on to trucks getting taken away to the works never to be seen again and farmers—they build up genetics over years often decades and often they know the cows individually. So it's heartbreaking for the children. You've got the Queensland fruit fly. One fly costs about a million bucks to get rid of. You've got to find it you've got to then eliminate it so it's not a cheap exercise. You've got stink bug. The stink bug incursion rate into New Zealand has increased tenfold over the last four or five weeks. And then you only need to look at foot-and-mouth. The predicted cost of foot-and-mouth hitting New Zealand would be about $16 billion.So this bill here the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) bill which is all about tracking animals tracking cows tracking deer for people who aren't quite familiar with this word NAIT"—it's a good bill. It's not supposed to stop disease incursions into New Zealand but it can stop the spread relatively quickly.With Mycoplasma bovis some of the problems—tracking these animals through faults of the current system is like a puzzle. It's like dropping a 1000 piece puzzle on the desk and then trying to figure out where these cows where these movements have been. I just want to talk briefly about several amendments the National Party suggested to the Primary Production Committee. I just want to acknowledge all members of that including the hard-working chair David Bennett. He does a very good job a very neutral chair and I appreciate that David gives everyone a fair go and also the officials. He really respects the work that the officials do for the committee.So the key points that the National Party are very happy with: one is around privacy; another around unsafe tagging and non-compliance. We had a big issue around privacy because we had the bizarre situation where you give your information to a public department then it was being shared to a private company. It's good to see that changed and also data duplication. You only need to ask a farming couple in Southland Mr and Mrs McCallum—they've got 1600 cows. They had to go through 80 different pages of data tracking nine-digit numbers and they basically had to track them up between NAIT and also another system called MINDA. So hopefully all these changes make it a bit easier for farmers. I just want to finish by acknowledging all the farmers affected by Mycoplasma bovis. Hopefully we can get through this. And for those reasons we support this bill."