Hague Kevin: National Animal Identification and Tracing Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: National Animal Identification and Tracing Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 14 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:384. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to take a call in this third reading of the National Animal Identification and Tracing Bill. The Green Party has supported this bill at every stage moving through the House. It was covered by my portfolio in the last Parliament. It is now within Steffan Browning’s portfolio but he is unable to be here tonight. Other speakers in this debate have canvassed many of the advantages of the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) system and I just want to run very briefly through those that we see because some of those are the same that others see and others are some different ones.  
I guess the first one I want to highlight and I do not think anyone has mentioned this tonight is the usefulness of this system in the event that we encounter a food-borne human disease. I am thinking of something like bovine spongiform encephalopathy—mad cow disease—and other prion diseases that are spread through meat and where traceability of meat and meat products plays an incredibly useful role in best promoting human health. 
Others have mentioned a couple of the animal health issues. One example that has been mentioned tonight is foot-and-mouth disease. I think of what might happen in that disastrous biosecurity situation. Some colleagues may not like me mentioning this but let us say that one of those palm kernel shipments comes in from a country where foot-and-mouth disease is endemic and the bacteria is found in the soil that comes with that palm kernel and we face an outbreak in this country. Actually being able to trace the animals that may have been affected by an outbreak is going to be incredibly important for our economy as well as for dare I say it the animals themselves. 
The other important use in relation to animal-borne illness that occurs to me is around control of stock movement. In this country as we try to get the cap on TB in our animal herd actually having a tool that assists us with better control of stock movement—and NAIT will provide that—has to be a really helpful weapon in the armoury. So some really important benefits there. My colleague Damien O’Connor has spoken about some of the innovation and stock improvement for example that this new technology will facilitate. I think you will find that his musing is not far from the mark. I agree with him that actually that is the kind of technological improvement we will need to make to keep adding value to our products to continue to have an export agricultural economy.  
Traceability—and other members have spoken about this—is important as one of those value-add components to our agricultural economy. Simply exporting raw commodities is no longer the way our economy needs to go. The future for agriculture in New Zealand is around adding value to those products and again NAIT is one of the fundamental tools for achieving that. 
Someone has mentioned Icebreaker. I am a great cyclist and tramper and I decided long ago never to walk into the hills without being clad in Icebreaker. Indeed that is the choice that many people both in this country and around the world have made. It is a great example a great illustration of the kind of economic value that is associated with traceability. Certainly there is an international movement of consumers along the lines of that Paddock to Plate initiative that Grant Robertson spoke about earlier in this debate. They want to know where their food comes from and they are prepared to pay more to know that. That is the future for our food export industries. So it is part of our way of creating a higher quality export sector by adding value. 
On the flipside we have raised a number of concerns at different points in this debate. These are not concerns that cause us tonight to reverse our position and to oppose the bill. We support the bill. We believe the positive attributes outweigh the concerns. But I just think in this third reading it is appropriate to recap some of those issues that we were concerned about. The first one of those was the lack of consultation with the organics sector in the development of this bill. We believe that that was a significant gap and we hope that in the development of future legislation we will not see that kind of gap. I draw the House’s attention to the fact that the organics sector is already a part of our agricultural sector that has considerable experience in the business of adding value and in targeting those consumers who have a very great concern about where their food comes from how the animals were raised and what the conditions were like on that farm. So involvement of the organics sector should have been a really important thing that was done in preparing this bill. 
The second issue that I want to raise which we have raised previously in debates on the bill is around the governance group. To our way of thinking it has yet to be satisfactorily explained why the original intention of a Crown company or a Crown entity was abandoned and replaced with the governance group that now appears in this bill before us. We do not see a rationale that would justify that change and we do not believe that that has been satisfactorily advanced in the debate in this House. So that is a concern for us. It is more than something that is an academic or abstruse kind of concern because the nature of the entity changes its responsibilities. So a Crown company or a Crown entity for example would have obligations under the Official Information Act which this governance group may well not end up having. The Animal Health Board is a great example of where the model that is used for the governance of an operation can change that. In the consideration by the Local Government and Environment Committee of the performance of the Animal Health Board in the last Parliament one of the major concerns that was raised by submitters was around the opacity of the Animal Health Board and the difficulty that one had actually getting information out of that organisation. It is a needless problem and it is one that we could have avoided in this case. 
Our related concern is that in this entity that is not really an arm of the State we have also chosen to vest quite considerable search seizure and related powers and we have an abiding concern that the extent of those powers outweighs the nature of the problem that those powers are created for. We think that is a real problem. We have signalled that we will be watching the performance of this Act in practice to see whether problems arise and we will bring them back to this House if they do.  
Finally I want to just mention the very big feature we see in this bill—that is providing value for our export industries by providing consumers overseas with information about where their food comes from. It is about time New Zealand consumers had that same right. It is time for mandatory and comprehensive labelling of food in New Zealand. Thank you.