McKelvie Ian: Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMcKelvie Ian: Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6660. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): The Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill is kind of music to the ears of the Primary Production Committee. It is the first bill we have had in this term of Parliament and I have to say that it is a bit of a relief because there is certainly some truth in the old adage that idle hands do the devil’s work.Richard Prosser: Oh Mr Chair!IAN McKELVIE: And so to have Richard Prosser’s hands busy will be a very good thing for us and Steffan Browning’s even more so.One of the challenges we face in an isolated small country with a comparatively small market is attracting the very best of international products. It has been apparent for a long time in New Zealand and particularly apparent in the agricultural sector. One of the challenges we have because of the small market is that we have a very limited ability to attract the very best products from around the world to New Zealand to establish themselves in the market place unless we give them the opportunity to get some advantage from being here. Very good examples in the past have been the ivermectin products that came into the country and Roundup. Those are two examples of products that have come into the country under the current regime and that have established themselves and gone on and been obviously reproduced and copied in many forms as a result of it.The bill will help encourage the entry of more of these products into our market place and as the world-leading food-producing nation we are we need access to the very best products we can attract at the most competitive prices we can get them. Of course if we cannot attract the very best products we have got a significant challenge and that is what this bill sets out to address. It gives us the opportunity right across the agriculture and horticulture sector particularly—and other areas as well but particularly those two areas—to attract products to New Zealand and get them tested registered and utilised in our primary production sector which will make a massive difference to our ability to produce.I was a bit taken by the use of the term “innovative chemicals”. I find and as you will read in the definition in the bill that innovative chemicals are in fact new ones that are being introduced to the country. They have a bit of an advantage in this process in that they get a longer protection term than chemicals—I do not like the word “chemicals” but I guess that is the word I am using—that come into the country and have already been used in other products. They are the non-innovative chemicals. They have been used elsewhere in the world and proven as well. So that is an interesting definition that we are using there.Both sides of the industries are concerned that the current data protection level is not sufficient and is inhibiting registration of the latest technologies as I have said. I think the Government review found evidence of that and consequently we have got this bill following on from it. We do not want—as the last speaker Meka Whaitiri talked about—to stifle competition because I think there is a balance between stifling competition and giving us the ability to use the very best of products in this country. So the bill is designed to encourage businesses to register new products and to register more uses for products that already exist. This is quite common where products come into the country are utilised for the specific reason they are designed for trialled in other areas and found to work much better than was expected so it is pretty important that we are able to extend those product uses and consequently the companies that extend those product uses get extra protection around that for another year or two.So I think this is a very good bill. I think it will make a difference and it is ironic that a small piece of legislation like this can have such an impact or potentially such an impact on the New Zealand agricultural sector—so it is really important for us. One would hope that all parties will support this bill in its first reading as we will be encouraging all stakeholders to share their views with us. I found that having preconceived ideas is perhaps not always the most productive way to make change. There will be controls on residues set out in parts of this bill and there will be other items of interests I think to all sorts of sectors in the New Zealand economy. I think that the process we will go through with the select committee and the submissions that come to it will cover many and varied areas of the use of agricultural chemicals and the like. I look forward to having this bill before the Primary Production Committee and I would encourage all interested parties to submit on it when the time comes. Thank you.