Robertson Grant: National Animal Identification and Tracing Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Robertson Grant: National Animal Identification and Tracing Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 07 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:125. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GRANT ROBERTSON (Deputy Leader—Labour) 
: 
 It is nice to follow on from the Minister for Primary Industries in such a bipartisan and harmonious way and I am sure the previous Ministers will admire that. [ 
Interruption 
] What was that? 
Hon David Carter 
: It’s so you can get to the gym by 6 o’clock.  
GRANT ROBERTSON 
: That is right! Do not hog the treadmill Minister. No it is good to hear that and obviously also when I look at this it does have an element of compulsion about it which I know is not something the Minister is a great fan of—the whole notion of compulsion—but clearly in this particular sector the Minister has decided that it is the time for some compulsion. There has been a voluntary take-up rate among I think cattle farmers of around 40 percent but clearly that is not enough in order to provide the kind of comprehensive scheme that is envisaged by the National Animal Identification and Tracing Bill. It is a pleasure to be able to stand and support this bill and acknowledge the work not only of former Ministers as the current Minister has done but of Shane Ardern and the Primary Production Committee who I know worked hard on this bill. 
The Minister and Shane Ardern both talked a lot about the foot-and-mouth situation and the importance I guess of New Zealand being able to avoid a negative consequence through a system like this identification system. I want to speak briefly about the positive opportunities that lie in this bill for New Zealand. A little while ago before I became a member of Parliament I did some work for the University of Otago and a project I worked on there with Simon Upton the former National Minister was called Paddock to Plate. It was the notion that if New Zealand is going to market its goods overseas and reach into new markets we do need to be able to address I guess the modern concerns that are addressed by traceability—that is do we know whether this was farmed in a sustainable way and what do we know about the health of the herd and the immediate environment that they are in? 
There is huge opportunity I believe provided in this bill for New Zealand to improve its export performance by being able to meet those concerns. It has been said that some of the most important people to New Zealand’s primary production industries are in fact the buyers for the big supermarket chains in the UK. If they are prepared to say “This is a product that is sustainable. This is a product that we know has been brought to us in a way that our consumers are telling us they want.” then we will go a long way to getting over some of those somewhat fictitious concerns about food miles and so on which when you balance that against the overall sustainability of the primary production process in New Zealand will actually give you a much more sustainable product even if it has had to travel a significant distance to get there. So I believe that this is actually part of a very important process. 
My own view is that actually we need to go further. It is not just about the cattle or in this case the deer; it is about the land that they graze on as well. What do we know about that? How much do we know about the sustainability of that land? Again declaring a little bit of an interest part of the job I had involved a company that has developed some technology. The company is called Regen Ltd and it was part of a company called Harmonic. They actually developed technology around measuring effluent and looking at soil acidity content and that kind of thing. If we are truly serious about a paddock-to-plate approach we need to go right back and ask whether we are able to give consumers in Britain who are buying their beef from Sainsbury’s information all the way from the kind of land through to the cattle and how healthy they are right through to how they are then farmed and produced and taken out to the shops in the UK. We have to be able to look from paddock to plate. Traceability is an important part of that and in turn this identification process is a significant part. But I do believe there is great opportunity here to actually look at this further. Equally there is great opportunity for New Zealand - based companies to help develop the technology and it is of some regret that one of the companies that is able to do that Sirtrack which grew out of Landcare Research is no longer New Zealand - owned; it is owned in Canada now.  
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: What happened to it? 
GRANT ROBERTSON 
: Well it is possible for Crown research institutes to sell off their subsidiary companies. It is perhaps disappointing that we were not able to retain the benefit of that in New Zealand but as I noted there are other companies such as the ones I have had some association with that are developing this technology. I know there are numerous other companies that I have not named today. I think it is important that we make sure that we use this as an opportunity to support that kind of new technology. That is the kind of development that will help our economy—to be able to say we will leverage off what is great and productive about New Zealand and create new technologies that go with that. So really those are just some brief comments to indicate that along with the rest of the Labour caucus I strongly support this bill not just because it will help us avoid the negative consequences of something like foot-and-mouth but also because it offers great positive opportunities in my view for New Zealand and companies inside New Zealand.