Guy NathanPrimary Sector (continued)Hon NATHAN GUY (National—Ōtaki): Thanks Madam Chair. It's a great opportunity to have a chat this afternoon about the primary sector and the annual review for 2017-18 right up to this present day. It's a good opportunity with the Minister Damien O'Connor in the chair to ask him a few questions through this process. It would be good to hear from him this afternoon about Mycoplasma bovis and indeed how he thinks that is tracking because in the last month or so there have been a lot of farmers second-guessing the Ministry for Primary Industries' (MPI's) response particularly around poor communication and slow compensation payments.But I want to say to the committee this afternoon that the National Party still does support phased eradication. We do acknowledge that this is a big response that involves Government and industry but there's been some changes in the general feeling in the last four or five weeks or so. There have been several updates on numbers from tracing and things and farmers certainly as they move into moving day—or moving weeks as it more commonly is now which is starting to occur at this point—want to hear from the Minister that he certainly is on top of the response. I guess he'll also want to tell those that are listening out there in rural communities that farmers need to play their part in terms of animal tracing.What's also interesting is that since we had the review we had the Rob Delane report and MPI's scramble with the Minister when they had two different fruit flies that popped up in Auckland. Of course they said in Opposition that they were going to stop all these incursions but the reality is it's very hard to stop them. So they reached out to Mr Delane from Australia who came in and over about a month or six weeks did a pretty good report I thought. One thing that was very telling was he said that technology needs to play a very important role into the future with biosecurity particularly scanners and the like. He also alluded to the fact that the processing area in Auckland International Airport is very congested and he commented that those low-risk passengers should be fast-tracked through. We did in Government have a plan for that. We started a work stream—Trusted Trader - Trusted Traveller—and when the Government came in they squashed that initiative. Now that presumably is going to be back on the table so it wouldn't take too much for the Minister to dust off that report and have a look at it.What Mr Delane actually did say is that biosecurity is going to need in the passenger pathway and the mail pathway another $10 million to $20 million invested each year was his belief. So I'll be interested. We're just a day or two away from reading the Budget unless it leaks out in the next 24 or 48 hours to the National Party. I'll be interested to see if there is a line item picking up the recommendations from Rob Delane.The other thing that's really important to note is that we discovered after the election that the green lane route didn't have any detector dogs working between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. There have been 37000 passengers that have come through the green lane without any dogs working on this particular exit route. What's been telling is that that occurred because there was a bit of a scrap with the unions about the roster. There was a bit of a culture in the small but very important dog detector team and the Minister did nothing to close down that loophole that existed. Just over 37000 passengers waltzed through the green lane in the early hours of the morning—that's the size of Gisborne city. They waltzed on through at the time when we had Queensland fruit fly running rife in Auckland—still there's a response under way there—and the Tongan fruit fly as well.Here's the telling point: just quietly around the time that the Delane report was in the Minister's hands MPI decided to put the dogs back on the green lane route between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. or indeed if there were no dogs passengers couldn't travel through the green lane. That is very important. So there's been a seismic shift just in the last couple of months. There's been a seismic shift just in the response to do with closing down this loophole and while the Minister said it was all operational I'm sure he had a hand to play in closing that route down.The other thing that's been important for us when we reflect back to the reviews is Crown Irrigation set up by this Government. All funding now has dried up for any projects that were in the pipeline that weren't contracted. The Minister's lucky that the Waimea Community Dam was contracted because we had the biggest drought on record in the Tasman-Nelson area and people were saying We need this dam."There needed to be a land swap. Would you believe that came through the Parliament and was supported. Hard to do under Ruataniwha but OK to do on the Waimea dam and I'm disappointed that the Government has raided all of that funding from Crown Irrigation and actually taken it and put it into trees and I want to come on to trees in a moment.Importantly if we think about climate change—and that's been very topical in the last couple of weeks and will continue to be for the rest of this year and potentially into next year—if we want to get very serious about wrestling these emissions down why wouldn't the Government allow the AgResearch trial on GE ryegrass to occur in New Zealand that's currently having to occur in Australia? The Minister will say "Well it's all about value" and "We extract all this value" and I've heard him say we get billions of dollars from being GE-free. I've never been able to see any report where that is confirmed and indeed is the case. So GE ryegrass will reduce methane emissions by 23 percent and it's drought tolerant. So farmers and rural communities are looking for the tools in the toolbox to do the right thing for climate change but this Government because of the Greens' ideology aren't prepared to even have a look at it.Now just focusing in on the trees in the last couple of minutes that I do have; the Government came out and said "We want a billion trees planted" and as a result they thought "How are we going to get this done?" Well one is subsidies one is making the changes through the Overseas Investment Amendment Act and they've made those changes for forestry rights and the like. So now we are really starting to see this policy roll out in rural communities. I know the Minister has had delegations into his office really concerned about what this does mean for provincial New Zealand and importantly rural communities.Just have a look at what happened last week—and it played out on social media—with the teacher at Kumeroa-Hopelands School over in the Tararua district. They've been struggling to attract teachers into this very small but important primary school. The teachers' partner was working on a station on a farm which was sold to forestry. So she's having to leave that community. They've had to try and attract eight teachers over the last 15 years. So this is the impact that the one billion tree initiative is starting to have on rural communities. New Zealand First while they crow about it about how successful it's going to be are now realising that they're going to need to do more than just a bumper sticker that's going to say "Right tree right place right time". It's going to take a lot more than that because rural communities are waking up to the fact that when large tracts of agricultural land carte blanche are taken over by foreign investors and planted and those that are involved in carbon farming and locked up for ever the rural school goes the roads get smashed in the process the rugby club probably folds as well as a result and rural communities are hollowed out.Now I'm not opposed to planting trees but the Government needs to be thinking about this policy intent where it should be focused on the land that has a land class of five and above—the hill country land—instead of some of the most productive parts of the agriculture sector going into forestry. Jobs are a hell of a lot less in forestry than what they are in rural communities and it won't be long before there'll be a group on the steps of Parliament protesting about the one billion trees. So I've got several questions that I've put to the Minister that I'm keen to hear responses on. Thank you."