Brownlee GerryHon GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam): Well Minister Damien O'Connor has taken a call this morning to apparently answer some of the genuine questions—Hon Nathan Guy: He hasn't answered the questions. Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: —I said apparently"—raised by the Opposition. Let me make it very clear for everybody that we have no objection to the strengthening of the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) provisions and the whole of his speech was all about the strengthening of the NAIT provisions. What we have a strong objection to is a bill that firstly has not been scrutinised by a select committee so it had no farming interests able to express an opinion on the need for the extraordinary powers that are conveyed in the bill.No one is going to be arguing against a better NAIT system that would have helped more in the circumstances. No one is going to say "Well we shouldn't track the movements of animals particularly in a country that is so dependent on its agriculture and where biosecurity is such an important aspect of maintaining our economy." No one's going to argue against that and the Minister I think is disingenuous in suggesting that that's what the Opposition are doing today.But it is still very unclear why a NAIT officer has to have such extraordinary powers of entry of surveillance and of seizure on farm properties. What's worse is that it's not even clear that those powers can only be exercised on farm properties. The reality is that there may be numerous places where such records could be held in the electronic world. It could be in the accounting offices in downtown Wellington or Auckland or Christchurch or Dunedin or in the small provincial accounting offices. It's quite possible that the records are held there and NAIT officers have an absolute right to come in and go fishing around to see what they're after without ever satisfying someone who is there to protect the civil liberties of New Zealanders—a judge in this case—that it's necessary to do so. All this rubbish about "Well records can be deleted notebooks can be lost."—all that sort of thing is complete rubbish.The other thing I'd have to suggest to you is that the concept of a NAIT officer having all these powers is clearly designed to be quite coercive of the farming community and another word for that might be "intimidatory" of the farming community. So if a NAIT man turns up at the gate you know that you could be in trouble. You know that there is no possibility of your declining entry to the property—well in actual fact they can't do that now anyway. But there is no idea that you could say "Well actually I do not have my records available today." There is no engagement but simply an understanding that you're about to be turned over by the NAIT officer. That I think is quite a problem and it certainly doesn't auger well for creating the sort of cooperative environment that will be necessary for the full implementation of the NAIT arrangements.It's also not clear exactly what went wrong in the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) investigation of the ratbag farmer down south. Why can't we know what the exact problem was that's meant that probably the people who are responsible for the M. bovis spread throughout the country are likely to escape prosecution? Simply passing it off and saying "Well this legislation will make sure that that can't happen in the future." is not good enough. It's not good enough. We are being asked to set aside all of the concerns that we have about the civil liberties of New Zealanders the freedoms of New Zealanders the right to consider your home your sanctuary etc. simply because a Government department failed to understand its own legislation.Now if I'm wrong the Minister will stand up and tell me I'm wrong and at the same time give us a clear indication or perhaps the example of what went wrong. But what's clear is that something did go wrong. Somebody inside MPI or some group of persons did not know how they should operate that legislation and that's why we're here today."