McKelvie IanClauses 1 to 6IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Chair. Who would have ever thought some 18 months later that we would be speaking in the final committee stage of this masterful piece of legislation. I want to congratulate the member in the chair Gareth Hughes for actually picking up something that was quite an array of excitement I suppose and putting it into some form. In fact when this bill entered the House you could have been forgiven for using one of Sir Walter Scott's sayings which was Oh what a tangled web we weave When we first practise to"—and I change the "deceive" to "conceive" because I wouldn't accuse Steffan of deceiving. But he did get this conceived and I think it's pretty fascinating that we've got to the point with this bill—which was a member's bill with good intent and actually had a large degree of support.The problem with this bill is it was hugely complex to instigate in the form it was designed. The interesting thing about it is that it's turned up as a one-pager at the end of it—or a two-pager to be fair to the proponents of the bill and also to the Primary Production Committee because they did an awful lot of work over the last 18 months. In fact I would have thought this was one of the most complex pieces of stuff that's gone through a select committee and come out in such a simple form. I think it's really quite interesting so congratulations to all of them on the work they did in getting it to this point.There are some interesting factors in this bill and a number of the issues that I was kind of interested in were particularly around pork because how you get a piece of cured pork that turns out as a single-ingredient food takes some imagination. In fact when you read the recipes for curing pork or whatever you can find them with almost twice the amount of ingredients put into the curing process as there is actual pork in the process. So that's an interesting sort of a challenge for—well I guess—the Minister at the end of the day to establish where that gets to.I think the other thing that many of you will know and I don't want to take the pork industry in vain at all but when you pop a piece of bacon in the frying pan quite often you end up with something coming out about a third of the size it went in. So that for a single ingredient bit of product is sort of interesting.But I think on the whole this type of legislation around the world is probably interesting. It's probably necessary. I wouldn't say it is necessary but it certainly gives consumers the ability to understand where things come from. I think it's really important. You can go to numerous countries around the world where products are sold by country of origin basically rather than you might go into a supermarket and you will find numerous countries of origin. Take a vegetable for example. In some parts of Asia you might find they come from five or six different countries and they'll be sold on racks according to country. So it is a pretty important thing for those people who are interested in the origins of their food.I think that for the select committee to have worked through the process and got from a point where the original proponent of the bill was very keen to put it into Parliament as a separate bill and in its own entity—it's now been picked up under the Fair Trading Act and I think that's a very appropriate place for it. It's got a whole lot of products listed. The Minister has the opportunity to from time to time add to that and extend the list of products that come under the rules of the country-of-origin labelling which I think is hugely appropriate. I think on the whole this process has really worked out pretty well. For those who sat on the select committee for the first 12 months that this bill was in the House you would never have imagined it would get to the point that it's got to now so I think that's a great credit to all those people involved in it.Of course the bill itself was put in process initially I think around the idea of market places of farmers markets—all those sorts of processes—or little markets that were selling food. It's now been standardised and it's much easier to follow how it should work and it won't apply to little country fairs to school gala days and things like that necessarily. There is an opportunity for that to happen if it wants to and people who sell things of course are always able to list their own product and the country of origin it comes from. So I think it's a pretty good solution.I think that the way this legislation is managed I suppose from a penalty point of view will be interesting because the policing of all of this stuff takes some time and is a bit of a challenge. But I want to congratulate the member who introduced it—Steffan Browning—and I also want to congratulate Gareth Hughes on getting this bill through the process. I think it's very well done and for the select committee they've done a great job with it too. So that's my little contribution."