O'Connor DamienHon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Minister for Biosecurity): Thank you Madam Chair. Look once again I appreciate the efforts of the select committee to work through the bill. It is the number two bill and we said that this would be coming. It is more technical and it does address some of the I guess harder issues and there probably will be adjustments into the future—there's no doubt about that—as we learn more.Look I'll just speak to a couple of the issues here. If I can just go back and I guess explain the reasoning for the bill. There are some pretty basic requirements that haven't been in place—that tags be attributed to a single place. I guess there was the growing practice of farmers mainly just sending to the freezing works animals that weren't tagged because it was inconvenient. Now we had to play around with that. They would pay the $35 penalty or thereabouts but sometimes they'd think that was easy. So it was slippage from the scheme which really did need to be and does need to be really robust. We exposed a lot of faults through the M. bovis management programme. Trying to eradicate that has been a lot more difficult a lot more costly because we haven't had a decent traceability system.So ensuring that farmers understand the value of this and the importance of it is what we're trying to do. You will be able to send an animal to the works without a tag but it must be unsafe to tag—there are some big animals and that's absolutely true on some occasions rather than just being inconvenient to tag as it was effectively being used as.The other two issues raised here: one is the I guess the Minister's ability to direct. We did have an organisation and they could well have said that while they were focused on getting tags in animals and traceability not the wider issues of M. bovis management. So when we asked them for a bit of cooperation to help us they were quite frankly uncooperative and gave us the finger quite frankly. So under the existing legislation there was no ability for the Minister to step in and ask them to step up their game and focus on not just animal tracing but actually being part of a useful biosecurity system. So the reason we are appointing someone and putting in place the ability to direct is that as a company they won't be responsible for biosecurity but if a priority of the Government is to actually focus on utilisation of the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) scheme for a biosecurity eradication programme then we need to be able to instruct them and to give them a bit of guidance on that. That's the reason that we've inserted that.The ownership of the core data it's left unknown. I have to say that when it comes to the interface with MINDA a point raised by one of the speakers—that is the other database system used extensively in the dairy system—then it's going to be a bit hard to work out if it comes to ownership—and a lot of people think that there's a lot of intellectual property and value in databases. Actually I think the world's moving on and saying a database is just a basic tool utilisation of it is where the value is; the point being is that not being certain as to who owns it. The only reason that the Government sought ownership on sale is that if the organisation was sold by any future Government—it certainly won't be a Labour coalition Government—but if it is to be sold then the database might go with that. What we say is it's so important for our biosecurity systems that we should retain ownership of that. Parts of NAIT might be sold by a Government in the future but the database should remain with the Government. Now that was kicked around by the select committee—that has been left unknown.Can I just say on the issue of transport operators that I too understand full well getting up in the dark and helping load animals on to a truck and you can't see whether the tags are there or not. But what we're supposed to have is tags that can be used read by some kind of monitoring system. We have better technology every single day and whether it's ultra-low frequency or high frequency we will see tags on animals in the future that give more than just identification but actually give movement location and the health status of animals; the point being that anyone who participates in a sports event will probably roll over or run over a pad or some kind of monitor that identifies when they started and when they finished.There could be 20 people going over at once and the technology now allows people to identify them. So in my opinion there will be a technology solution for truck owners. They will just have a monitor on the backdoor and every animal that goes on to that truck will be recorded with its electronic ID and the truck driver will know in the cab exactly the animals on board just as they know their tyre pressure just as they know a whole lot of things that we never knew of in the past. So we've left that and I think the position established by the committee is that a declaration should cover that and protect the truck driver that the person in day-to-day charge of a NAIT animal should state that as they do with an animal status declaration (ASD) form as they do now. But we should probably move on from a paper-based ASD form and we'll move into an electronic one. And the ASD form if it aligns with NAIT which it should in the future—it should be quite simple for the truck driver to know exactly what animals are on their truck. If there's an animal not identified  then that shouldn't be carted because M. bovis—and some say bovine tuberculosis—is carried and spread on the back of a truck. You hear that from farmers all the time. So it was our attempt to say that every person in the system has to share some responsibility. It wasn't an attempt to put all the blame on to the truck owners or the transport operators or the truck driver; it was to say that we all have to do our bit to ensure that we have a robust animal tracing system.Anyway I accept the position that the select committee's come back with. We'll pass that through but I'm sure as we move forward there will be a solution in technology that allows us to know where animals are going—every one of them all the time in real-time data—and that will allow us to actually battle and eliminate things like M. bovis in a hell of a lot more timely and less costly manner. So I just once again acknowledge the select committee in working through this very carefully. Thank you.