King Annette: Food Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Food Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 13 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17754. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Labour—Rongotai): Today I feel a little bit like a mother about to give birth after an abnormally long gestation period because I need to tell youthat this is even longer than an elephant’s this one. We are talking years and years and years. As the Minister for Food Safety said it has been over 10 years. In fact the Food Bill started between 2002 and 2006.At that stage I was responsible for food safety in New Zealand as the Minister for Food Safety. I am sure Shane Ardern will commend me for the work that I actually undertook because it was during that stage that I undertook a domestic food review. The consultation for it took place between 2002 and 2006. That domestic food review did take 4 years and it documented a number of problems with our food safety regime in New Zealand including the significant and rising incidence of food-borne illness. This was of particular concern because it affected the New Zealand population. It also identified three different food regimes and three different regulators operating simultaneously with resulting poor lines of accountability and unnecessary confusion inconsistency duplication and complexity.What we were told was the cost of the food-borne illness and it was considered to be at that stage around $86 million a year. Approximately 90 percent of this cost was attributed to the loss of productivity due to the absence of a workforce when somebody is affected by a food-borne illness. It also identified a number of confusions about when the Government is involved. There were a significant number of businesses that were unaware of the legislation they must meet to ensure that the food they sell is safe and suitable and certainly regarding who administers the legislation. These factors alone did lead to non-compliance unnecessary regulatory costs and significant and unnecessary compliance costs.That was the beginning of the whole process for this legislation. It was really important that we got it right because food production in New Zealand stands out among food-producing OECD nations as a dominant contributor to the country’s manufacturing production gross domestic product import intensity export intensity and trade balance. It also employs an awful lot of people—around 35000 to 40000 businesses depending on the definition and up to 200000 additional part-time food premises. It accounts for about 20 percent of the working population in jobs. It has a real value at the time that this work was done of around $13.6 billion. So you can see it was a very very significant sector—it still is a very significant sector—and we pride ourselves on the food safety of this country. We live and fall by the food safety of the food that we export and eat in this country. We are judged as a food producer by how well we perform in this area.So 10 years ago this started. We now have this bill and all I can say to the members of the Primary Production Committee is thank you for the work that you did but now we want to see this Parliament pass this bill before the general election of 2014. It should not end up being carried over to the next Parliament for those members to finish it. It must be finished in this Parliament. I urge the members of the committee—the influential members of the committee Mr King and Mr Ardern in particular—to make sure that the Minister gets this bill through the House before we rise for the election. I am sure it would be a legacy from the members of the select committee two of whom are retiring at this election. They would like to see this bill passed and to say that after 10 years we finally got a bill in place that had agreement from this House and we have put in place the best possible food regime for this country.Labour supports the bill. Our main comment would be that it is 4 long years since the bill was introduced. The bill was first introduced in May 2010. It had its first reading in July 2010 and look we are in May 2014 and we are having our second reading. That is an awful long time for a bill to sit around and for things to be considered. The committee in fact got 527 submissions on this bill. Only 19 of them were actually heard. The bill is actually quite a different beast from when it was introduced. Therehave been some things in here that I think greatly improve on what was originally put into the bill.I think there are perhaps a couple of things that I would like to talk about and one of great interest to the public and perhaps the only thing the public ever remembered about the Food Bill was the public outcry about the “sausage sizzle clause”. If you were to ask people what was in that Food Bill that Parliament introduced 4 years ago and did the work on 10 years ago the only thing they will remember is the “sausage sizzle clause” which meant that good folk raising money for charity were not going to be able to have their sausage sizzle because they would be ruled out through over-regulation of food safety. I am pleased to see that this has been amended and made sensible in this bill. So those who are acting for a charitable purpose will still be able to have their sausage sizzles and their bacon sandwiches and their whitebait patties I imagine are another very important thing that will be able to be done under this exemption. That is very sensible. It was never intended that this would stop sausage sizzles. It was about how you got the food plans properly organised and who should have a food safety plan and so on. This exemption makes that clear and I am very pleased to see it happen.Another area that I think is important is where you make changes to ensure that no one can say a food is unsuitable on grounds of moral religious or ethical aversion to that food. You would have mayhem if somebody for some moral or religious reason said “We can’t have that food on the shelf because we don’t agree with it.” So this in fact is made clear in the bill—that it would not make a food unsuitable for consumption on those grounds.The last thing I will mention—and my very good colleague Damien O’Connor who has been carrying on with this bill mentioned it—is the great sadness I had when the Food Safety Authority was dumped by this Government. It went in the total opposite direction of the rest of the world which had been setting up independent food safety authorities—separate from industry and separate from Government departments that deal with industry. The Food Safety Authority had very high recognition very high acceptance. In fact its reputation was an international reputation and it developed that in a very very short space of time. It was led ably by Andrew McKenzie and a wonderful team of people who specialised not only in domestic food but in the export of our food. They did much of the negotiation around our food when it came to our free-trade deal with China. They were world class. I think it was a philosophical burp for National to get rid of it. There was no reason to get rid of the Food Safety Authority. What happened was that it led to an error very early on where it changed from the Food Safety Authority to—what is it called now—the “Ministry of Food” or “Ministry of Agriculture” or whatever the name of it is now. National mixed it up again with industry.We will have an independent food safety authority. The rest of the world believes that for the safety of the public for honesty openness and transparency you should have an authority that is separated from industry. So I just wanted to put that on the table. I am sure that although the members opposite may not say it publicly those members who are well-informed on the Primary Production Committee know that that was a very stupid mistake. It was a political error that was made and has been to the detriment of New Zealand.