Ewen-Street Ian: General Debates 
Ewen-Street Ian: General Debates 
[Volume:607;Page:4982] 
IAN EWEN-STREET (Green) 
: 
 I want the Minister for Biosecurity to do me a favour. I want him and some of his officials to go to Auckland and when they are in Auckland I want them to conduct a clinic for those people who have been affected by the spray for the painted apple moth. Instead of making flippant remarks about them suffering a temporary inconvenience for the good of the country I want him to sit down and listen—not speak to but listen—to the people who have been affected. 
I want the Minister for Biosecurity to listen to the schoolteachers who are deeply concerned about their students. They are concerned that some of their students may die. I want him to hear the professionalism of those teachers and to know that they are not being hysterical. I want him to listen to pregnant women and new mothers. For them this spray is a terrifying ordeal. I want him to hear first hand what their fears are for their children. I want him to see the faces of those people whose existence has become a nightmare of motel rooms of worrying about their kids at school and of worrying about sealing up their houses by plugging up the cracks in their windows their doors and their chimneys. They come home and wash down their cars their vegetables and their kids. 
I want the Minister for Biosecurity to hear the consistent stories of people who have developed asthma and other allergies as a response to that spray. I particularly want him to hear the consistent stories from people all over the spray zone who have been to their doctors with their health concerns. I want to hear the Minister explain to them why it is that when people go to a Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry doctor they are told that their symptoms have nothing to do with the spray—and those people are therefore not included in the statistics. But when people go to their own doctors the doctors say that the symptoms are to do with the spray. Yet their symptoms are still not included in the statistics because the people concerned have not been to a Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry doctor. 
I want the reassurance of the Minister that that is not a cover-up. The people of west Auckland feel that they are part of a gigantic experiment with their health. The true human cost of what is happening in Auckland is being covered up by a statistical catch-22. A person is not part of the statistics if he or she goes to a Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry doctor because the symptoms are not deemed to have been caused by the spray but if a person goes to his or her own doctor and the symptoms are deemed to have been caused by the spray that person is not included in the statistics anyway because the doctor was not a Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry doctor. 
I also want to hear why the Minister continues to advocate fanatically for free trade and to make excuses as to why we cannot close the gaping holes in our biosecurity defences that allow these alien species into the country in the first place. The main pathway at the moment for invasive pests is of course sea containers. By its own statistics the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry currently inspects 24 percent of sea containers coming into the country even though it knows that 39 percent of them are actually contaminated. When one realises that there are 400000 containers per year coming over our wharves one understands that that 15 percent represents 60000 contaminated containers that are opened without inspection. It is no wonder that we have a problem. I want to know why the Minister thinks it is acceptable to spend $90 million on bombarding the residents of Auckland with poison when he has not moved to minimise the entry pathways for those pests. I want to know why the Minister thinks the needs of the importers of foreign goods are more important than the health needs of the people of Auckland. 
I want to know why the Minister for Biosecurity thinks that the intellectual property rights to Foray 48B outweigh the rights of the public to know what they are being sprayed with. Most of all I want the Minister to go to Auckland to have a clinic and to listen to the teachers and the pregnant women. Their faces and their stories are something that I cannot forget and I am sure that if he plucks up the courage to front up the Minister will not forget them either.