McKelvie IanIAN MCKELVIE (Chairperson of the Primary Production Committee): Thank you for that very sage advice Mr Chair. I am of course completely impartial in this matter. The Primary Production Committee of this House is a pretty collegial select committee. I want to thank the members of that select committee for their participation during the course of this debate and during the course of the year; their input has been pretty significant.Of course we run the sector that is the backbone of the country. There are some 350000 jobs in that sector. There is export revenue of $38 billion and it is predicted to grow by 10 percent to $41 billion in the next year or two. I have never seen in my time—and I suspect that our committee has never seen it in its time—this sector in such good heart and I will go into that a little further. I also want to thank the Ministers Guy Bennett and Upston for their contribution to the select committee in the course of those discussions.The total appropriation for Vote Primary Industries is $991 million. It is a significant amount of money and I will detail where some of that goes in a moment. There are some programmes in the course of that that take quite a significant amount of money on their own and the Primary Growth Partnership process which the Government has entered into over the last 8 years has come up with some great successes. It has come up with some proposals that have not been such great successes but that is the nature of science. That programme swallows up some $720 million and the great successes have initially related to forestry and fishing.Another really challenging issue for this sector is irrigation and I would contend that there is a quadruple bottom line to irrigation around community recreation the environmental factor and the economic factor and it is an issue that the Government has been grappling with for some time—and clearly the sector is grappling with it as well. It is an issue that I think we will do well in in the future. We have just got to get the settings around it correct.Biosecurity is our Minister's most important issue that he deals with and he has acknowledged that on a number of occasions. The total spend in this area is of some $223 million. One of the big challenges for this area in the next year or so will be reviewing the import health standards and of course those reflect directly on some of the factors that we are dealing with in the country at the moment because we do import seeds and quite a number of other things into the country—palm kernel being a big one I suspect—and so there is a whole lot of stuff that needs to be done around that and that will be reviewed in the course of the next year.For fisheries there is $30 million to upgrade and modernise the fisheries management system. This includes cameras and monitors on the fishing boats. We have seen a significant improvement in the performance of this sector as well. I think one of the really interesting things in this sector was the passing some 3 years ago of the foreign charter fishing vessel legislation which effectively has tidied up a lot of our fishing industry and the vessels they use for that business.Food safety is a very important factor that this committee deals with and the Minister deals with. It has got a lot of intricacies around it. It is hugely important to New Zealand's agriculture sector and in fact to our export sector. It probably is almost the key actually to most of what we do.Another issue that the committee deals with at length—and this Budget deals with at length—is animal welfare which is a big challenge for New Zealand. When I say that it is a big challenge for us it is an area that we have to get right. It is an area that is critical to our primary production exports and I think we do pretty well with it.Another topic raised during the course of this discussion was that of careers. We need some 50000 more people by 2024 in this sector. There is a large number of what we might call foreign workers employed in the agricultural sector particularly around horticulture and the dairy section and so consequently the immigration settings of the country are very important to those sectors.Forestry is another very important sector for New Zealand. We have got record levels of forestry exports right now and the committee dealt with that in the course of the discussions. And there are two I think very topical issues—other than the biosecurity one—that the committee is dealing with now that relate to honey.So that is a brief summary of what the committee has been up to in the course of the last year and what we dealt with during the course of the Estimates discussions. I thank the committee and the Ministers for their participation in that. Thank you.