McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): It gives me a great deal of pleasure to speak in the third reading of the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill. As has already been said tonight it is a bill that has been a little while in the making but it is a very important bill for New Zealand agriculture because it gives us the opportunity I guess to become more innovative than we have been and to get access to some modern and innovative products that have not been available on the New Zealand market to date. It also gives companies the opportunity to protect those products for a little longer and that is the reason they will be available in the market place. As well as that it also gives us the opportunity to use products for different uses than we have to date. This legislation enables companies to protect that data for a little longer as they change the use of those products from one use to another. So it is a pretty important bill for agriculture in New Zealand and it gives us a really good opportunity I think to rid the country of a large number of chemicals that are well out of date. The reason it gives us the opportunity to rid the country of those chemicals is that there are much better newer and more innovative animal remedies and what we would know I suppose as chemicals primarily around weed control and things like that—there are all sorts of pest controls—on the market in other parts of the world than there are in New Zealand and this bill will enable those to come to New Zealand. So I think it is quite exciting for New Zealand. It gives us the opportunity as I said to become more innovative and it will clean up a lot of the old chemicals around. For quite some years now companies have been stating that the amount of protection they get on bringing a new chemical into the country is not adequate to enable them to go through the cost structure. So the cost structure is too high for the short-term time frame they can protect that data and consequently because our market is so small it is not really economic for them to bring that product to New Zealand to make it available to our farmers. The Primary Production Committee had some interesting debates on this and as often happens on our select committee we ventured into discussion on all sorts of other things from food safety to food labelling to country of origin to Monsanto which is one of our favourite topics actually. Fortunately our select committee staff are very tolerant of us and they do put up with some quite wide-ranging discussions on these topics that we have in the course of the select committee meetings. But out of that discussion comes some interesting stuff and I think it really just emphasises the fact that we need to create opportunities for new and modern innovative products to come to New Zealand in order to eliminate some of the older ones we have. So—like the previous speaker Damien O'Connor—I am not going to take too long on this contribution but I do want to congratulate the Minister Jo Goodhew on bringing this bill to the House. I think as I said it is a necessary bill and it will do a great job. We did have great discussion on the select committee. We did not reach full agreement and the Greens have inserted what I would consider to be an extraordinary minority view appended to the bill which is almost bigger than the report itself. But none the less that is how we live in our select committee and it works pretty well for us. So it gives me pleasure to support this bill as it goes forward. I think we have had adequate discussion both in the select committee and in the House on where this bill is going to take us and where it is going to take agriculture in the future. It will improve our opportunity I guess to get rid of some historic chemicals and it will also improve farmers' opportunities to make a great deal of progress using new generation products. So I have got no problem commending this bill to the House and thanking the select committee for the hard work it did on the discussion on it. Thank you.