Guy NathanHon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries): Farmers and growers up and down the country will be heading home later on this afternoon. They will be checking their mailboxes for their mail that comes through. They will be opening up those invoices today or maybe later in the week. There will be a special letter delivered to them today from the Labour Party. Inside there will be an invoice from Jacinda Ardern and David Parker. On the top of that letter it says: Invoice for water".But there is something a little different about this invoice. Normally when farmers and growers get an invoice it is for feed it is for grazing it is for buying stock it is for fixing the tractor or doing up the irrigation system and the like but this one is a blank invoice. It is a blank invoice delivered to all of our hard-working farmers and growers up and down New Zealand today. It does not have any detail about price. However in the fine print at the bottom of the invoice there are some very important details that our growers and farmers must read: "Sorry we haven't worked out how much we're going to charge you yet. I hope you understand that I've only had a couple of days on the job. We're going to work that stuff through after the election with the Greens if we get into power. I know this stuff seriously impacts your livelihood but try not to take it personally. Keep positive. Lots of love Jacinda Ardern. Kiss kiss."Today's Labour announcement on water policy sucks. It is badly thought out; it is badly implemented. It is going to damage the most productive sector of the New Zealand economy and that is the primary industries. Today Labour slammed the door shut on the primary sector. In the process Damien O'Connor got smashed to pieces. He got rolled by a caucus that is more excited about the urban vote than the rural vote. On that side of the House they do not care about the regions. They do not care about provincial New Zealand. They do not care about hard-working farmers and growers up and down the country.Let us just unpick this policy for a couple of minutes. Within 5 years all intensively stocked land near waterways will be needed to be fenced but importantly there will be setbacks for riparian planting. Now it is all well and good is it not—setbacks for riparian planting—we applaud farmers who have made that decision. But let us think practically about the 26000 kilometres that have already been fenced that may not have been riparian planted. So now Labour is out there proposing that all of those posts and wires should be pulled up and set back. Is it a metre? Is it 2 metres? Is that 4 metres across the entirety? Think about the productivity; think about the weeds that will grow. Think about the slowdown of the New Zealand economy as a result.Then we come to the prices. Stuart Nash was exposed big time this afternoon was he not? Because while Jacinda Ardern and David Parker are saying "Let's all come together after the election." Stuart Nash is out there already proposing 10c a litre. Then very importantly if you extrapolate those numbers across—I have got them here. Importantly irrigation uses about 6 trillion litres annually across the country. So if you extrapolate 10c a litre across irrigators that is $600 billion. Then if you think about the water that needs to be utilised to produce just 1 litre of milk that is $40 for a litre of milk. The cost of this policy is going to be enormous and not just on the people who underpin the New Zealand economy but consumers. Consumers are going to pay for this daft policy because up will go the price of vegetables; up will go the price of food. This policy is ludicrous.Now my message to the people in the primary sector who are really wound up on this policy announcement today is that they should bombard Jacinda Ardern's email. They should be ringing her office and demanding a meeting this week or early next week not putting it off until 24 September because that is terrible."