Luxton JoJO LUXTON (Labour—Rangitata): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise and take a call on the Dairy Industry Restructuring (Fonterra Capital Restructuring) Amendment Bill. As the chair of the Primary Production Committee which will be looking over and progressing this bill it makes it even more of a pleasure and I'm looking forward to hearing from the public from farmers themselves from companies from dairy co-ops etc. about this piece of legislation. It is a short turn-round with the report-back date being set for 10 November and I know that as far as dairy farming goes they are pretty much coming to or nearly finished carving. So I'm hoping there'll be just a little bit of time there—enough time for them to be able to submit to this before they get too heavily into artificial insemination which I know some of them probably are already undertaking at this stage.I have to say the weather for us in the electorate of Rangitata which I represent hasn't been too bad; it's been reasonably kind. We have had a pretty good time as far as weather goes anyway for calving. I also want to acknowledge and join with my colleague Barbara Kuriger in congratulating Fonterra and farmers out there for this record payout. It just goes to show dairy farmers out there are a success story for our country and they contribute so much to our economy. In fact as well as other primary producers they have carried our economy through COVID and allowed us to be able to recover the way that we have.I wanted to pick up on a couple of points that the previous speaker mentioned and one of them was around the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and the concerns that they raised in their report around the potential for this to increase emissions and impact on our waterways. I have to say I do agree with Barbara Kuriger on this matter that I don't see that it necessarily means that because more farmers will be able to become shareholders that that means more dairy farms popping up as Barbara Kuriger said. I think that the country realises and the farming community realises that they probably have reached peak cow" and are looking at ways whilst having reached "peak cow" that they can just continue to improve practices of which we have some of the best in the world as far as dairying goes.I also like the fact that this does allow our younger farmers our sharemilkers to become shareholders—something that potentially they couldn't have been able to do prior—and I think it's really important because often with different farming types it's difficult to get into farming itself. If you think about sheep and arable it's often a family farm and I think dairying is one of the only ways—albeit very hard—to work your way up through and into that farm ownership. Becoming a shareholder was something that was not able to be obtained and so I think that this piece of legislation will certainly look to allow that and I don't see that it will increase or assume that new dairy farms will pop up because of this change in this piece of legislation.What we have here with this piece of legislation is the fact that Fonterra is a massive success story for our country. It's been a fantastic success story as far as it's a cooperative company and the fact that it is 100 percent a New Zealand - owned cooperative is something that we should all be very very proud of. I think it came about because of the Dairy Industry Restructuring Act—the DIRA as it's referred to—in 2001 which allowed this the Fonterra to be set up. We know that as I've said before and various other speakers have said before our dairy farmers are actually world-leading and the Fonterra co-op has been part of that—an essential part of that actually. We heard before that the farmers providing milk to Fonterra—it's around 79 percent of the milk that's produced in New Zealand that goes through Fonterra so it is a key part of our dairy industry here. We provide dairy exports to 130 countries and 95 percent of all dairy milk produced in New Zealand is supported with expected revenue of approximately $19.1 billion a year. So it is worth a huge amount to our economy and it also employs around 49000 people within the industry throughout the country. Given that DIRA and Fonterra were formed in around about 2001 times change things change practices change and everything evolves. I think that it's only right that we continue to look at and evolve this piece of legislation as is needed given that practices change and also the fact that we are facing changes within our climate and our environment. So it just makes sense that we continue to look at this piece of legislation and improve it. There's a couple of things that this piece of legislation does but it does improve transparency and independence of the governance and operation of milk price settings in New Zealand. We heard before that Fonterra has the shareholders within its cooperative but other ones—not like Fonterra but others—they don't make their farmers and suppliers become shareholders. So the issue is that with Fonterra collecting the majority of milk across the country they pretty much almost set the price for milk or the farm-gate price for milk. That has been a concern for other milk companies in order to remain competitive and so I think what this piece of legislation does—and I know that the member opposite Barbara Kuriger has expressed concern around the way that perhaps the panels might be set up in so far as having ministerial nominees for the Milk Price Panel being increased from one to two. But I do think that it's important because the price that Fonterra sets does impact across the sector and we do need to make sure that we do have a level and an even playing field when it comes to the setting of the milk price. So it's important that there is some oversight transparency for other agencies and things like that which gives comfort I suppose to suppliers to farmers to know that others don't have to raise the milk prices in order to compete with Fonterra in order to keep their shareholders. I just think that with this bill with the transparency that it will provide it will certainly help keep that playing field somewhat even. I mean I know that last year the Fonterra shareholders voted in favour—I think 85.16 percent voted in favour—of their restructure out of 82.65 percent of eligible votes being cast and so I think that's a really clear indication that Fonterra itself were keen on having this restructure. I think that it will be a really interesting process when we hear from—I'm hoping—many submitters. It is a short submission time frame but I am looking forward to hearing from the submitters in that we might be able to address some of the concerns that Barbara Kuriger has raised and perhaps there might be others that are raised throughout this this afternoon in these speeches. So I think it'll be a very interesting process and I am looking forward to it. I think the select committee will be a pretty robust exercise hearing these submissions but I do think we work as collegially as we can when it comes to our primary sector because it's such an important one. I commend this bill to the House."