O'Connor DamienHon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): Labour will support this bill. We understand the need to make progress in our food safety regime and generally the Minister for Food Safety outlined very accurately the details of the bill. It is for the most part a technical piece of legislation but I have to say that I was concerned when the Minister said that this would effectively put the issue behind us—or words to that effect—that is the whey protein concentrate 80 dilemma. It is costing us hundreds of millions of dollars at present. It was a major disaster not in terms of actual harm to people but in terms of harm to New Zealand's reputation and we will be paying a price for many many years ahead. What we had particularly in the China market was a first entrant advantage—the first country to sign a free-trade agreement with China. We were moving into that market with some momentum particular in the area of dairy but what this did was set us back big time. What we have seen in that market is countries like Ireland the EU and those who have caught up to us and our advantage has now slipped. The Minister referred to the independent report and it is indeed sober reading. It was necessary and it has provided 38 recommendations. I acknowledge to the Minister that the Government is attempting to work through and implement each and every one of those. But if we can go back and learn—because as I said I do not think we can put it behind us and I do not think we can say that just by the passage of this legislation we have made vast improvements. There is still in my view an issue of resourcing and an issue of independence in the food safety regime and in the area of policing and implementation of the regulations there is still some I think conflict of interest when the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) is the one organisation responsible for so much across the primary sector: policy development implementation of that policy and then in the policing of that. You cannot stand up and hand on heart say We have the best regime in the world." when there is so much conflict of interest in the way of the structure. We have said that we will pull food safety and biosecurity out of that big monstrosity of the Ministry for Primary Industries and have them set up as independent agencies where they have the autonomy the independence and the resources to do their job because New Zealand's reputation—and in fact our future as an economy—depends upon the absolute implementation of the best and highest standards in the world in terms of food safety food quality and biosecurity. So we must learn from the mistakes of the past. I acknowledge that the Government has brought this legislation to the House. It is not an insignificant piece of legislation—in fact you know in terms of size there is a lot of detail and I am sure that the select committee is going to take quite some time to work through it all and we will do our best to make improvements where necessary. If I can go back to the report it is important that we read the report understand that the legislation was driven by the report and ensure that what we pass through the select committee and back through the House gives effect to what has been recommended here. If we go back to I guess the summary of what happened here—in terms of MPI's response I do not want to read all of the summary here but I quote: "The ministry had no single coherent (or reviewed or rehearsed) crisis plan for a food incident that it could implement straight away after receiving notification of C. botulinum." It is quite concerning really. It goes on to say that "The ministry deserves credit for many aspects of its response but it should have had better-documented decision-making processes used more rigorous science-based risk assessment". We are told by Ministers in particular the Minister for Primary Industries time and time again that we have world's best-practice biosecurity systems—Todd Barclay: That's right.Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR: —and that we have the world's best food safety systems. That is right. The members over on that side have heard it time and time and time again. It is not the truth—it is not the truth—and what this report exposed was the faults in the assumptions that lay within MPI because of a Government that gave it a whole lot of responsibility by bringing a lot of agencies together and said: "Get on with it; you can merge your policy areas. You can bring your policing and monitoring regime into animal welfare biosecurity and food safety. We just need a kind of a standing army that has general skills but no specialist skills." What I know in biosecurity and what this report identifies in food safety is that we have not got enough of those specialist experienced people remaining in MPI to stand up and say hand on heart: "We have some of the best systems in the world." The recommendations from the inquiry are fairly clear. It says it should revise the rules for non-routine reworking of dairy products continue to strengthen its monitoring and auditing activities finalising its food incident protocol undertaking regular exercises—it goes on and on to identify things that we would have assumed were part of a world's best-practice regime; it was not. One of the recommendations here says: "The law should be amended to give the ministry a specific statutory power to compel disclosure of relevant information (including test results) needed to respond effectively to a food safety incident." The Minister points to the new powers that this bill will bring in and they relate to of course the area of IT and new technology and the report identifies where the transfer of that information was not timely not always accurate and not always robust and science-based. We need to ensure that the regulatory authority has the ability to find out any fact that it needs when it comes to incidents like this. We need to assure the world that we will continue to provide the safest finest quality food to consumers regardless of where they are—in Central China into Europe into the UK or into South America. We need to assure each and every one of those markets. That will require more resourcing and more expertise to ensure that our standards meet and exceed those of all of those markets. The Chinese at the moment are getting particularly sensitive to some of these issues—I have no doubt in part because we have talked about initiating an inquiry into low-quality steel coming into the market. The Prime Minister is a bit sensitive about this. In fact I think he has misled the country when he said that he was not informed about possible retaliatory action when we were talking about an inquiry into the quality of steel. I think there is a lot to be exposed in that area.But the issue for food safety—as Zespri is finding out at the moment—is that we need to ensure that anything that we export from this country is top quality and safe. The issue with Zespri is not about safe food. In fact in my view it is just a non-tariff trade barrier—it is something that has popped up and I would not in any way like to imply that Zespri is in the same boat or connected to what we are trying to do here. Being able to test appropriately having the right science in place—and we did not have that when it came to this. The testing regime was deficient the transfer of information was deficient and the final decisions were in fact disastrous—not for human health but for our reputation. So what we are doing in the House here today is introducing a bill that we hope will make progress in terms of reassuring our customers around the world and actually making our system more robust. But if the Government thinks that the passage of the legislation alone is going to make a huge difference then it is ignoring the reality that within MPI there are too many conflicting objectives in our view. And until food safety and biosecurity are brought out of MPI into separate independent agencies we do not think the passage of this bill will entirely address the issues that were raised in this report. Labour will support the legislation but will be scrutinising it very very carefully in the select committee."