Baldock Larry: New Organisms and Other Matters Bill — First Reading 
Baldock Larry: New Organisms and Other Matters Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:608;Page:5335] 
LARRY BALDOCK (United Future) 
: 
 It is with pleasure that I speak today to voice United Future’s support for the New Organisms and Other Matters Bill. This bill is the culmination of a process that began with the setting up—at the insistence of the Green Party—of the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification. The royal commission considered 10861 written submissions from the general public and another 107 written submissions from organisations with “interested persons” status. The terms of reference were broad the processes were inclusive and the deliberations were thorough. The conclusions reached by the royal commission were in United Future’s assessment sensible moderate and well balanced. It concluded that New Zealand should keep its options open and that it would be unwise for New Zealand to turn its back on the potential advantages offered by this rapidly growing field of scientific knowledge. We were to achieve that by proceeding with caution and by minimising and managing risks. We were not to achieve that simply by going around and banning things on an ideological basis. 
At the heart of the royal commission’s recommendations was a central theme of the desirability of preserving opportunities. Based on a solid scientific foundation the recommendations were aimed at enabling and encouraging the coexistence of all forms of agriculture. Each form of agriculture—conventional organic and genetically modified—was seen rightly in my view as having the potential to make a unique contribution to the overall benefit of New Zealand. The royal commission found that New Zealand’s basic regulatory framework and key institutions were already adequate for dealing with genetic modification (GM) in New Zealand. Most of its recommendations focused on enhancing this existing regulatory framework and institutions. It did not seek to throw everything out and start again or to take drastic steps to bring the existing framework up to some new much higher standard. That is what this bill is all about. It implements the sensible moderate recommendations of the royal commission so that we can be absolutely sure that our regulatory framework and institutions are as good as we can make them before the GM moratorium is lifted in October this year. 
Surely then having had the royal commission having seen the royal commission’s moderate well-balanced recommendations and having seen those recommendations brought into this House as legislation the Greens are now satisfied. Surely they can accept those measures are based on thorough consultation and sound science and can agree to New Zealand moving forward—but with caution. Surely they will be happy to act as a watchdog to make sure the Government remains vigilant about the new technology and ensures that the regulatory framework keeps pace with any new developments. Sadly though for the Greens as much as for anyone else this is not the case. When the royal commission that the Greens instigated did not reach a conclusion that agreed with the ideological Green agenda the Green Party refused to accept its recommendations and is still relentless in its opposition to allowing genetically modified organisms to be released in New Zealand no matter how tightly regulated. Opponents of GM like the Greens will tell us that the reason for such implacable opposition is that the technology is new and untested it does not do things in the same way that the random processes of nature would and it could therefore wreck the environment and our economy for ever and so on. However they are overlooking one tiny flaw in their argument. Nothing in real life is certain; progress by its very nature is decentralised and open-ended. It moves in unpredictable ways. The most we can ever do is manage the risks and that is what this bill is doing. 
All technology is new at some time and there is always a degree of uncertainty. I doubt whether any worthy scientists would ever say that something was 100 percent certain. They might say that it was 99.999 percent certain but never 100 percent certain. It is this uncertainty which always exists in reality that the Greens movement has seized on. Its members are opposed to GM technology for ideological reasons so they are urging us to meet an impossible standard before the technology can go any further. The same is true of other anti-GM advocates. Their entire argument is characterised by unverifiable psuedo-scientific claims and selective facts taken out of context. Most of the inventions that enhance our lives in so many ways now could never have met the safety standards of those people. The car electricity the aeroplane modern medicine—we would have none of those things available to us today if previous Governments around the world had required their inventors to meet the Green Party’s standards for proof of safety. It is just plain ludicrous. 
Luckily for us now as in the past and despite this Luddite wing of the Green movement’s best efforts their stalling tactics will not work. Because of the unreliability of the Green Party as a supporting partner of the Government during the last parliamentary term and its willingness to bring a duly elected New Zealand Government down over this single issue the current moratorium is designed to lift automatically. Even if we do nothing else in this House this year the moratorium will still automatically lift in October. Some may accuse United Future members of not extending the moratorium but that is clearly not within our power. Any initiative to extend the moratorium rests with the Government. We are thankful that the voters of New Zealand gave sufficient support to United Future to enable us to play a moderating role in this process and to break the stranglehold the Greens had over the Government after the collapse of the Alliance. United Future is satisfied that this bill does everything that can sensibly be done to minimise and manage any risks posed by GM technology to the New Zealand environment and we are supporting its introduction to this House today and its referral to the select committee in order to ensure that all those regulatory measures are in place before October. 
While we do not deny the right of the Greens members of other groups such as the Sustainability Council organic farmers and others to have their voices heard those voices must represent only part of the discussion. One reason for our attitude towards this discussion and our confidence that our approach is the responsible one is that the people who will be most affected by GM technology are for the most part strongly supportive of it. Those people are New Zealand’s farmers. The biggest farming lobby group Federated Farmers of New Zealand supports the bill’s commitment to case by case assessment. This approach was part of their submission to the royal commission. According to one of their spokespeople at least it appears to be much more concerned that this new bill does not end up unnecessarily stifling scientific innovation than with any concerns for their own environmental safety. To quote Neil Barton: “It is vital that scientific innovation is not stifled by extreme obstacles.” Supporting Federated Farmers’ optimistic assessment are the papers the Government released recently relating to coexistence between different forms of agriculture and the effects of genetic modification technology on the New Zealand economy. Those papers were perfectly sensible and based on quite rigorous scientific analysis. 
The paper on the economic impacts of GM at the very least demonstrates that the lifting of the moratorium is unlikely to have negative consequences for the New Zealand economy and is quite likely to have at least a small positive effect. As I said in my press release last week the key point made in that paper in that respect is that overseas consumers are unlikely to base their purchase decisions on whether the product’s country of origin is GE free. In fact they are unlikely even to know New Zealand’s GE status in the first place. The survey showing some overseas consumers would make a decision on that basis is misleading because it specifically brings New Zealand’s GE status to the forefront of the survey participant’s mind and asks them to make an abstract judgment. In reality they are unlikely to be thinking about that issue or to know where New Zealand stands when making a purchase and are more likely to make a purchasing decision based on price. 
The paper on the coexistence of GM and non-GM crops is even more rigorous and is based on sound science and common sense. It advocates treating each GM crop on a very rigorous case by case basis instead of having a generic framework for all genetically modified organisms as originally recommended by the royal commission. United Future’s policy at the election last year was to continue with a cautious approach to GE provided all the relevant regulatory and other matters stemming from the royal commission had been properly addressed by that time. With the passage of the New Organisms and Other Matters Bill United Future will consider that process to be complete. 
The bill represents a victory of common sense over ideology and pseudoscience. It presents an opportunity for New Zealand to move forward scientifically and economically. Even symbolically the failure to move forward and embrace the possibilities of a rapidly advancing technology such as genetic engineering would have seen our country well on the way to becoming poor irrelevant and backward and it would have been a situation entirely of our own making. United Future supports the passage of this bill.