McKelvie Ian: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMcKelvie Ian: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 31 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2740. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): It is a shame when you have got to start at the back end of your speech and finish at the front end but that is what I am going to do. I take issue with the previous speaker Trevor Mallard on a number of things he has raised in the point of that speech and I take exception to the way that he dealt with farmers. Clearly legislation is never going to stop errant people; it is only going to prosecute them or punish them for being errant. I think those numbers are very few in New Zealand and I think it is a gross miscarriage of the use of this House in fact to use the terminology that he used around the number of people who I guess break the law and things like that. I also need to defend the Minister for Primary Industries and his ministry. I think they do an outstanding job. We have an international reputation second to none when it comes to animal welfare—the only countries that do better than us have no animals—and I think we are particularly careful about how we treat animal welfare in this country. We do have a great record as I have said.I just want to touch on Supplementary Order Paper 48 in the name of the previous speaker which I will refer to as Mr Mallard’s Supplementary Order Paper. Over the years a regime has evolved around the way we look after and I guess treat animals and that has evolved over centuries throughout the world. We have some practices in New Zealand that this Parliament clearly thinks—and I agree—will eventually need to be changed. But changing practices that have evolved throughout history and evolved for the better on the whole throughout history is a long-term process. I think it is totally impractical to think we can stop these practices after 7 years when we may well need to take significant notice of the changes that occur in those years leading up to the expiration date of our tolerance for them. We certainly need to have some ability to allow those practices to continue provided they are closely monitored and managed in a proper manner. So for that reason we will not be supporting Supplementary Order Paper 48. I think it is far too severe and I think it places our ability to farm in at least two areas of our food chain at great difficulty when in fact all we would do is accept produce from countries that do not have the same set of standards we have.Hon Trevor Mallard: No it wouldn’t.IAN McKELVIE: It certainly would. So I think that is interesting.I want to go back to the beginning of this bill and the reason for it. It is hugely important to New Zealand. It deals with about $25 billion worth of exports annually and that is increasing on an annual basis. We have a huge amount of importance put on that. I also want to deal very quickly with the select committee process. I know that the Minister touched on it and I think that the cooperation around the somewhat I guess agitated debate on this bill was pretty good around that table. It took quite some time to get the bill through the Primary Production Committee and that process certainly from the Green perspective and from a number of inputs from the Labour Party had quite an interesting impact on where this bill has eventually got to. I think we have arrived in a pretty good space on that. So some 2½ years after the introduction of the bill we are back in the Chamber talking about the Committee stage and I think on the whole we are in a good space.I want to very briefly talk about the Supplementary Order Paper introduced by the Minister Supplementary Order Paper 69 which is very important in that it enables us still to deal with if we need to issues that are quite I guess complicated around the health and welfare of the New Zealand community and at the same time it protects animals from any kind of cosmetic testing—I guess the word “cosmetic” is probably the most logical word. So it puts us in a good space in that respect. It enables us to do some work if it is urgently required but certainly it precludes us from doing what I would call the spurious or the miscellaneous stuff which we can certainly find other ways of satisfactorily getting through if we need to.I think we have arrived in a good space on this bill. I think the select committee did a great job on it and I think that all those people involved in it from the chairman Shane Ardern down had a great input and did very well.Hon Clayton Cosgrove: He was a real farmer.IAN McKELVIE: He was a very good farmer Shane Ardern. I am happy to leave it there in the meantime. I think we are in a good space.