Woolerton R Doug: Animal Products (Dairy Products and Other Matters) Bill — Second Reading 
Woolerton R Doug: Animal Products (Dairy Products and Other Matters) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:624;Page:19009] 
R DOUG WOOLERTON (NZ First) 
: 
 New Zealand First will support this bill. We commend it to the House and support its being passed into legislation. 
The dairy industry provides 25 percent of New Zealand’s exports which I think is a particularly relevant figure. I know that it is not fashionable to separate areas of financial activity but we in New Zealand First happen to believe that exporting is vital to our country and that exporters should be helped in any way possible. 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: In any way possible? 
R DOUG WOOLERTON 
: In many ways possible as well! When this bill was being considered we thought about removing regulations keeping the status quo mending the Dairy Industry Act or having a new Dairy Industry Act but in the final analysis it was agreed that provisions about dairy products should be integrated into the Animal Products Act and that is what this bill does. 
On behalf of our farmers and our major exporters we spend a lot of time and the bureaucrats and the people in the Government on whom we rely to facilitate such matters spend a huge amount of time to ensure that access to other countries for our products is—to the degree it can be—guaranteed. That is not an easy task. We are constantly having to update Acts and to rejig the things we do in New Zealand in order to line them up with the restrictive regulations of other countries—regulations that are really no more or no less than non-tariff barriers. 
So that is the market where we are putting our product. It is not a friendly market; it is a hard-won market. We have thousands of people in New Zealand working hard to ensure that we remain in that market. 
I will not go on about the details of the bill. I worked with a very wise gentleman for many years in the milk business. I was deputy chairman of the company. 
Ian Ewen-Street 
: The milkman? 
R DOUG WOOLERTON 
: No I was not a milkman but I might as well have been. At the time those people in the business were earning more than I was actually. 
He was a very wise gentleman my chairman and he always used to say to me—and it has stood me in good stead—“Doug don’t worry about the figures. We pay people to do that. Doug don’t worry about whether the grammar is right or whether the full stops are in the right place. We rely on their education to do all those things. What you have to look for is to make sure that what they are trying to achieve is what we as shareholders are trying to achieve and to make sure that we are not working in their interests but that we are working in our shareholders’ interests.” I like to regard things that go through this Parliament in the same light with the people of New Zealand—and particularly in this case the dairy farmers and the people employed by them upstream and downstream—being substituted for the shareholders. 
It is important that we facilitate in any way we can the streamlining of regulations and those things that add costs to our industry participants and this bill to a degree helps to do that. There is a clause that enables the Director-General of Agriculture and Forestry to give official assurances. Those things all used to be given in various degrees by a wonderful organisation called the Dairy Board and I had a lot of time for the men and women who worked for that board. 
They used to work at the cutting edge. The cutting edge was not technology; it was the law—international law. They used to work around it up to it and to all sides of it to get our products out. I admired those people for their entrepreneurial spirit and for the fact that they were able to push the boundaries to the absolute maximum if sometimes a little too far. I would like to think that that spirit is still alive and well in Fonterra today. 
Those people were the guys who used to sign off the sorts of things that we will now ask the director-general to sign off and I think that with the entrepreneurial brains available in Fonterra our major exporter it is fine that the director-general takes over that role. I think it is quite right that a governmental person has that role rather than a quasi-Government body or an industry body as the Dairy Board used to be. 
We agree with the contents of this bill and we will support it but I have to say that we must always be aware that we are here in this Parliament to try to make things easier for the people who produce for this country and for the people who export. By doing so we can bring in the money that allows us to import what my father used to call luxury goods and he used to frown on that as only a person who has been through the Depression could frown on things such as nice cars nice lounge suites and even nice food I might say. I grew up in very hard and tough times and I like to think that I still have empathy for those people. For that reason New Zealand First will support this bill.