Tirikatene RinoRINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I would like to add my support to the second reading of this Food Safety Law Reform Bill. Can I congratulate the newly appointed Minister David Bennett on the great gravitas with which he delivered his speech and the good work of the Primary Production Committee led by our chair Mr McKelvie. It is a shame about our deputy chair but that is another matter. We are a hard-working committee and we did give plenty of consideration to this bill.As my colleague Mr O'Connor mentioned this is a very important bill—a very important bill. Our food safety system is paramount and is absolutely integral to us as an export-producing nation. We all know too well the failings that arose as a result of a pipe that was not cleaned properly in one of Fonterra's plants that made infant formula which led to a worldwide recall of products a host of systemic failings within the testing organisations and a communications faux pas and to this day the cost has not truly been fully spelt out in regard to the damage caused by that botulism scare. So this is an important piece of legislation. We are just completing the amendments to the legislation that are required in the adoption of the many recommendations that were made under the Government Inquiry into the Whey Protein Concentrate Contamination Incident.And so here we are. We are making amendments to our three main food safety Acts: the Animal Products Act the Food Act and the Wine Act 2003. Other speakers have touched on the main issues that arose at the Primary Production Committee and I would like to acknowledge with thanks all of the submitters who came before our committee. There were a lot of leaders of industry groups—for instance Horticulture New Zealand Meat New Zealand the meat groups right across the board and Seafood New Zealand. This is all integral to their adherence to food safety standards which are in aid of our exporting and the selling of our delicious products worldwide. So it was great that they fronted to the committee and made some very helpful recommendations.I would like to just touch on as touched on by Mr McKelvie the fact that a lot of the submitters actually submitted beyond the scope of what was actually in the bill but they made some very very cogent points particularly around—for instance that dear artisan cheese producer Biddy over in the Wairarapa—how we must try to support and foster. It is about striking the balance between minimising the risk and fostering innovation and also protecting the integrity of our industries as a whole.When a small artisan cheese producer has to spend 40 percent of their revenue in testing verification just for a certain batch of cheese something is not quite right there. You know I can understand when you are talking about that flash Timaru plant in Fonterra that makes mozzarella in 6 minutes which we see on the telly at the moment—I can understand that obviously that is a very expensive verification process and should be very thorough but for a very small artisan cheese producer it makes the business uneconomic. That is why as touched on by Mr O'Connor it is the innovation that comes from the small producers particularly these artisan producers—we want to foster that. We do not want to stamp that out through over-regulation and over-compliance. So it is just finding the right balance. We are very concerned about this particular issue and so I am pleased that we are going to be doing further work in that area. But there were many artisan producers who came before the committee and made that exact point.Can I also acknowledge—and it is also probably outside the scope of the bill—that there was a very impassioned submission by the early childcare centres in relation to the food safety requirements and the testing and the verification that has to go into just feeding kids in early childcare and again the cost that that adds to looking after kids in childcare. Those were some very good submitters.In terms of the actual bill itself I am pleased that we were able to provide I believe a good model of ensuring that when regulations are made under primary legislation those regulations must have a clear time frame for being enacted. And so for instance the commencement date on certain clauses—rather than just saying that those particular provisions will come into force on the adoption of regulations we have imposed a time frame for that to happen. And I believe that is actually a good practice that should be adopted across all pieces of legislation. We have recently had the Statutes Repeal Bill because certain pieces of legislation have been redundant and dormant as a result of those very measures. They have never actually come into existence.The tightening that has taken place around the regulations particularly around the commencement certain exemption clauses—those are good practice and it actually puts the onus now on the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) and other agencies to ensure that they actually come up with these regulations promptly and consult with industry when required and ensure that the participants in the whole export sector have some certainty around what is required for their business. I think fundamentally that is what this bill is all about. It is about providing certainty for our food producers who transact with markets all over the world so that they have a very clear knowledge of their responsibilities in relation to how they actually engage in trade.One of the main I guess areas of contention was around the obligation for an owner to supply their complete risk management food safety plans to a verification body and for that verification body to actually hold that plan for every food business that it deals with. These plans can be absolutely enormous. I am talking about thousands of pages just for one export business. I think that whilst we grappled with you know making sure that there is tight regulation and the ability to promptly be able to target in and home in on information that may be required for a food recall or testing I think we struck the right balance there to ensure that it is not necessary for every verification body to hold that voluminous amount of information when really that information is already there and is already accessible within the business itself or within MPI itself and therefore it should be able to readily get to that information if it so needs to.There is a lot contained within this bill. I have touched on just a few of the main matters that came before the committee but we are on our way to improving our food safety Acts and I believe that we have done some very good work within this committee. I therefore commend this bill to the House.