Tirikatene RinoRINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Oh thank you Madam Chair. I'm very pleased to speak at the committee stage of this bill. I too would like to acknowledge Mr Hughes for shepherding this bill through our Primary Production Committee and now through the remaining stages and likewise I acknowledge Mr Browning who originally introduced this bill.The key to this bill—and it has been elegantly drafted I must say. We received some excellent advice from the advisers in our consideration of this bill but I am pleased to say that I'm quite proud of the work that the committee has achieved through finding an elegant solution which is not overly prescriptive which provides flexibility through the promulgation of regulations but ultimately achieves the outcome which we want to achieve through this bill which is to inform consumers of the country of origin of the food products they will be purchasing. The crux of this legislation is that the detail will be created by regulation as I've said and that will be done by the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs recommending the making of regulations … prescribing"—and this is the key term—"a consumer information standard for the disclosure of a regulated food's country or place of origin."I just have a question to the member in the chair Gareth Hughes and that's in relation to—I've been thinking about the bill and the intent is to inform the consumer of the country or place of origin. It will be interesting when the regulations are being drafted how they will be able to require enough information which is informative to the consumer and not actually redundant I guess. How do you differentiate between a country or place because if a place is used well unless you know intimately the geography of the actual country which is the source of the food it will be very very difficult to actually know the actual place? So I don't actually see much merit necessarily in the actual use of a place name. A country of origin definitely I think will be able to better inform the consumer.However I think there may be an issue for instance when—I'm thinking of an example when say a fish product is caught in international waters. So it's actually not part of any country of origin but the place in which it is caught as well is quite ill-defined. It could be a seamount somewhere out in the ocean. How would that food be described? What would be the consumer information standard for that particular food product? So I think these are all quite technical but necessary questions that will need to be closely considered by the Minister and his ministry in the development of the regulations to ensure that—yes we want to ensure that there is enough information available to the consumer but we want to make sure that that information is actually meaningful to the consumer as well. So those are just some initial thoughts around country and place.The other matter that I had was how we are going to disclose the country of origin of food. It is deliberately broad. It's not actually a label now; it's actually what is appropriate I guess for the food product in question. But in thinking about that yes it may be—I believe a big sign would be sufficient for a big bin of apples or whatever fruit it is—grapes—to adequately meet the relevant regulation requirement. But there may be instances where—is it a positive obligation that for instance if that signage was not prominent enough would that lead to a conviction of a person a retailer perhaps if there is no labelling on the product and the actual generic signage or whatever is imposed by the regulations is not sufficient to adequately inform the consumer? Thank you."