O'Connor Damien: Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7181. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): It is interesting timing that this bill comes to the House when as Brett Hudson the previous speaker said the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement—well we do not know what is quite in the agreement but it currently lies before the corporations in the US and all of those people over there but not before the members of Parliament in this House. But we are told that there will be issues in there related to intellectual property protection.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order!Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: There have been—and that is becoming very narrow Mr Assistant Speaker. That intellectual property protection is at the core of this piece of legislation and it works both ways. I guess if the members over the other side were to admit that actually the market does not always work you actually have to intervene to offer protection to people from both sides of the debate whether it be the suppliers or the users of in this case intellectual property related to chemical use. We are—or we have been in the past and we will struggle to remain there—some of the most efficient producers of safe food in the world and we are going to have to work really hard to maintain that reputation.I do acknowledge some of the issues that the Greens raise here because I do not think it is smart for any country or any producer of food to use more chemicals than are absolutely necessary to produce the amount of food that we need. But it is not smart to produce more food and sell it at less value which is also the mandate that the Government seems to have taken on board. So the objective of this country must always be to produce the best-quality food using the least inputs and the least amount of chemicals to go to the highest-value customers. We should never forget that clear objective.What this bill does is provide a little bit of protection for companies that in the true Kiwi way innovate with products or chemicals that are currently in use. This is not at the heart of new chemicals; it is what you do with those chemicals. We have in this country a number of chemicals that have been approved for use in certain crops or on certain weeds. What Kiwis do as is our inclination is we say: “Oh maybe we could use that on something else.” because if it bowls over Californian thistles it might do Scotch thistles or it might knock out black-seed grass or something else that this Government seems to have let into the country because of its poor biosecurity systems. Kiwis tend to innovate. But there are and there should always be strict criteria over how chemicals are used. So when companies bring chemicals into this country they have to go through an extensive process—through the Agcarm legislation and process—and then of course the hazardous substances and new organisms legislation which says that we are not going to allow the use of any chemical that might in any way endanger the health of anyone who consumes the products from the things that may be sprayed or affected by this. We must uphold those standards.When it comes to as I say new weeds that we might be trying to eliminate because of poor biosecurity standards—and there is an alarming number of new weeds and pests that come into this country every year because the National Government has not got a strict and robust biosecurity system. When farmers or horticulturalists want to address this they will want to do so in a way that maintains the safety and integrity of the core product they are growing be it apricots or apples or any kind of barley crop or whatever—you name it. So if a company that has a chemical that it uses on barley and someone or—no let me go to actually a case in point that has been raised here and it is with regard to fodder beet.We have seen a rapid expansion in the use of fodder beet in the dairy industry and we have got many chemicals that are registered for fodder brassicas but that are not strictly speaking registered for fodder beet. So when the farmers who are growing this rapidly expanding crop to feed their dairy cows want to control some of the weeds they say: “Well maybe we can just go and grab the chemical that we used on fodder brassica.” It might be all right on fodder beet but it has been approved for fodder brassica so you have got it a bit mixed up here. What companies could do is spend the money to get certification and approval to use it on the fodder beet. But what happened was that having gained approval the information was then available through the process. Someone who just came along with a new chemical with the key active ingredient could say: “Well we want to register our chemical as well.” and the company that has done the research and done the certification process then receives no protection.I think it is reasonable that we offer some protection for the investment that those companies make in ensuring that we have the wise and safe use of those chemicals on a similar crop. So that is the reason that Labour will be supporting this bill’s referral to the select committee. But we are not going to give carte blanche approval to companies that are just going to come in and prevent innovation or other generic utilisation of chemicals in this country. We need to ensure there is a balance between innovation and protection of intellectual property.Federated Farmers of New Zealand came along as they often do. I think it is a rather naive approach to say: “We just want open competition. We want to drive down our costs and it is all going to be good.” I think that is a very naive approach. I think they must accept that the companies that bring in these chemicals—and as a part-time boysenberry grower or probably a fairly poor boysenberry grower myself I am very aware of application rates of the different active ingredients in many fungicides in particular that there can be. In fact boysenberries is a classic case where for a small crop companies have had to get approval to use fungicides used on apples or other things to be then used on boysenberries. There is a process they must go through to ensure that the consumers of boysenberries and boysenberry products are consuming safe products.So I can understand as both a producer and as a legislator I suppose the need to have a sound balance in this approach. I am not sure that the Government has got the balance right. It very rarely gets the balance right in legislation I have to say. But we do trust the Primary Production Committee to actually investigate all these things and to make sure that we do get it right.Labour will support this piece of legislation going to the select committee to ensure that we get the balance right. But the objective as spoken about by the Greens of having safe food products from this country is absolute and we will not allow the contamination in any way of those food products by chemicals that are not designed to be used at the rates recommended and under strict conditions on the crops that they are registered for. That is a core objective of this piece of legislation I hope.We say that leaving this open to the market forces as the National Government does in most of its thinking in legislation would not be appropriate here and I acknowledge that National for once is accepting the need for proper legislation for a balance between the property rights of the chemical companies and the farmers and the protection of the safety of the consumers at the end. That is what we must ensure. We in Labour here understand full well the need to get that balance right. The select committee will investigate that balance. Therefore Labour supports this legislation.