O'Connor DamienHon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Minister of Agriculture): Look Mr Chair thank you. I'll start on the live eels one and I appreciation the Greens' concern for our longfin eels; indeed all of us should have concerns for them. There is a limited quota capacity that is calculated on the basis that it's a sustainable catch available to iwi and to other fishers across the country. Some of them are indeed exported.The Animal Welfare Act does cover animals but there is exclusion for fish for a number of reasons. If we were to include and bring fish into the Animal Welfare Act and under this jurisdiction—maybe the changes that she proposed—it does require quite a lot of policy consideration. I'm not saying that it should not occur but it would be ad hoc to bring it in at this stage and indeed the member given her luck will probably put in a private member's bill and it might come up. I invite her to do that.Look there is a longfin eel strategy that is due to be released and I think we look forward to that. I think that that will give us a clearer indication to ensure that firstly the quota available is a sustainable one. I think Minister for Oceans and Fisheries would be open to you know changes to that or working with the Department of Conservation to make sure that we haven't got that figure wrong. But just simply supporting the Supplementary Order Paper without having done the policy work around inclusion of fish we think would be a step too far. But I acknowledge the concern that she has and actually many others and most of us in the House should have for that.Can I just go back to the question around data. I accept actually leading into the early stages of this whole area of concern there wasn't very good data. Indeed when I looked the so-called reports had been sanitised. I had major issues with that within the department and with the system that we had that didn't deliver us accurate reports on what was happening on some of these voyages which I have to say was probably a culture carried over from the previous National Government—but I'm not going to get into that.Can I say that that sanitisation—and again I've had to really push and we have had through the transition period that we have allowed the industry to move away from this. We have been getting better information and it has identified ongoing issues of heat stress and of course of lameness which are the two areas of most concern I think from an animal welfare perspective.Because we do have animals that are going from a temperate climate—often they might be in Southland or somewhere or South Canterbury—where many of them are loaded on to boats and they're put on to these vessels. They are cramped. They go through tropical environments. The heat stress has been acknowledged in numerous submissions to the Primary Production Committee one of which is a personal submission from one of the vets on board—acknowledging that those people on board were doing their very very best in really challenging circumstances.The idea that if the animals get hot you might hose them in fact would create a spike in humidity which would add to it. So all of these things that might be considered—Barbara Kuriger: This is not on all ships Minister. Not on all ships.Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR: Oh really? Oh is that right? The member over there knows; she's been on one of the boats I'm sure.I think that if you look through some of the issues that have been brought to the attention of the select committee and certainly myself on balance what we are saying is that we can't afford to put New Zealand's reputation as good managers of our livestock and our livestock protein production system—upholding adhering to and promoting the highest standards of animal welfare. We can't put our reputation at risk and continue.