Tirikatene Rino: Biosecurity Law Reform Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Tirikatene Rino: Biosecurity Law Reform Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 12 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5191. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
RINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga) 
: 
 I am pleased to make a short contribution on the Biosecurity Law Reform Bill at its third reading. As I have mentioned in my other contributions biosecurity is vitally important to our country to our primary sectors. It is about protecting our industries our regions our brand and our pa. I use that descriptive term because it is a battle that goes on every day at our border where we have our visitors coming through our airports and goods that come through our ports and the flows that happen every day. So it is an ongoing battle that goes on and we need the best biosecurity systems in the world. 
I know that the Minister for Primary Industries does say that we do have a world-class biosecurity system and that must be the aspiration that we want to achieve. Unfortunately we have seen some really serious mishaps particularly over the past couple of years with some serious pest incursions as Mr Simpson has just spoken about. We have had the Psa virus affecting the kiwifruit industry and some other serious incursions such as the fruit fly from Queensland. The varroa bee mite was another one that has come through. 
We need to protect our pa and Labour does support this legislation. We have supported it right the way through. We have expressed a lot of reservations around particular things like the Government-industry agreements but on the whole we do support the bill because there were a lot of aspects around our biosecurity systems that needed updating amending and improving and they are incorporated into the bill which we have supported. 
As Mr McKelvie mentioned though there can be the most elegantly drafted piece of legislation that has all the bells and whistles in it but it is actually the resourcing that underpins that legislation that is vitally important. So I do differ from Mr McKelvie because it is the resourcing of our biosecurity system that has faced significant cuts under this Government. Hence we have heavyweights from right across our primary sector that have been really upset at the amount of cuts that have happened to the biosecurity sector and right across the board. I am talking about organisations like Federated Farmers Horticulture New Zealand and New Zealand Kiwifruit Growers. They have said that there need to be fundamental changes to the biosecurity system and there needs to be more resourcing put into the system. 
What we have seen under this current Government is a relaxing of our biosecurity system. The Government wants to make things easier. It wants to make travel tourism trade and the importing of goods a lot easier for business so it has lowered the cost of our biosecurity system and our model and it is putting more of an emphasis on risk management rather than risk prevention. Well if the Government listened to our primary sector industries which are saying we need to put the emphasis right on protecting our pa if it listened to Federated Farmers and to those other esteemed industry organisations that represent the primary sector it would hear them saying that we need to beef up the funding and the resourcing that goes into biosecurity. 
We need only to look at things like what the industry is calling for—100 per cent X-ray checking of all baggage through all our airports and sniffer dogs. We all travel regularly in and out of Wellington Airport. I have not seen one little beagle sniffer dog for years. We also need an increase in biosecurity staff. We have seen a 12 percent reduction in front-line biosecurity staff under this Government yet we have seen a 14 percent increase in the amount of international visitors so there have definitely been cuts to the resourcing of the biosecurity system. So that is what we do challenge the Government on. 
We do understand that this piece of legislation is long overdue. A lot of the measures in the legislation were created under the Labour Government so we do commend this bill at its third reading but we implore the Government to further resource the biosecurity sector.