Sage Eugenie: Dairy Industry Restructuring Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Dairy Industry Restructuring Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 17 July 2012. Volume:681;Page:3560. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party continues to oppose this bill the Dairy Industry Restructuring Amendment Bill partly because of the speed with which it has been pushed through the Primary Production Committee. The fact that one in three farmers voted against Trading Among Farmers shows the very knotty issues that the committee should have had more time to deal with. The Minister in the chair the Minister for Primary Industries was saying that those opposing the bill are assuming that dairy farmers are stupid. The fact again that one in three farmers did not vote for Trading Among Farmers shows that there are a lot of intelligent people who have major issues with the bill. We also oppose it because it potentially undermines the successful operation of Fonterra as New Zealand’s most financially successful cooperative through the whole issue of the shareholders being able to sell their shares into this fund and then getting outside investors in. 
I would like to correct something that the member for Kaikoura Colin King said. He did not correctly represent our position in opposing this bill. He claimed that we wanted to cap the number of dairy farms in New Zealand. That is not true. We want to cap the number of dairy farms in particular catchments—in our lowland streams lowland lakes—where intensification of land use is having major effects on water quality. Last month David Bruce of the  
Otago Daily Times 
 reported that Southdown Holdings and Williamson Holdings the two companies that were behind the very controversial cubicle cow proposals to milk 11000 cows in the Mackenzie Basin had folded and gone into voluntary liquidation. Richard Peacocke the Mount Maunganui businessman who was behind Southdown Holdings was reported as saying that the shareholders living in Australia made “a commercial decision” that it was too hard and that they would do something else. Well that was a very good decision for the spring-fed streams and wetlands of the Mackenzie Basin and for Lake Benmore. 
But the fact that thousands of people had to get involved in the Resource Management Act process and had to point out the environmental inappropriateness of dairying in the drought-prone Mackenzie Basin highlights a major defect in this bill— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) 
: Order! Order! Can the member just address Part 1 of the bill. 
EUGENIE SAGE 
: Yes; I am. That defect is that it fails to amend the substantive Act to allow Fonterra to be strategic about the expansion of its supplier base so that it does not have to collect milk from areas such as the Mackenzie where dairying in a dry drought-prone region will affect our waterways and biodiversity and will be very difficult. By allowing non-shareholders to buy units in the Trading Among Farmers fund their focus will be on maximising the dividend return. The focus then of the directors and their fiduciary duty is to provide a return to those shareholders. The bill by not allowing Fonterra to be strategic about where it collects milk will mean there is potentially more pressure on the company to continue to grow its milk supply regardless of the impact that that has on waterways and water quality. That is another of the reasons that the Green Party opposes the bill. My colleague Steffan Browning will deal with the Supplementary Order Papers and the concerns we have about those.