Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you very much Madam Chair. Well it's quite interesting that the Government members have found their voices in the committee of the whole House. It's quite unusual; so they won't be quite used to that.This Consumers' Right to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill is a very important bill and I have sent a text to Steffan Browning and I hope he's at home listening. He never gives up. He said Maybe we should put an SOP in for grains and nuts and oils to be included."Kieran McAnulty: It's not too late.STUART SMITH: Well it's not too late but I'm not going to put one in.On the Primary Production Committee as has been said we spent a lot of time going through this and as Mr McKelvie said the bill is significantly different from where we started. It was really interesting working with the officials to see how things changed as we went through this process. It's quite simple you would think to say "Look we want all the food on the shelves that we buy to have their country of origin." But once you start to get down and try and get a legal definition of what a country of origin is when you start adding things when the food is processed in some way or has other products added to it—salt for example; did the salt actually come from the same country that the base food did?—that's where the real rub came in terms of drafting the legislation. We seemed to spend quite a bit of time going in circles trying to find a way through this.Eventually of course we went for a fairly simple single-ingredient food option in the bill but we included bacon in it. So there are some tough areas to deal with along the way. But of course we've found out very late in the piece that the Minister could do this by regulation and therefore we didn't need to knock ourselves out trying to draft the perfect bill particularly given that it was a member's bill and the member didn't have the backup of a cast of thousands of officials to help draft the bill. It was very complicated for quite a simple process.The bill is in Gareth Hughes' name and he's done a fine job taking over from Steffan. I know Steffan's a great supporter of home-grown foods and particularly a great supporter of the local farmers' markets and I think that is where all the consumers who will be interested in this—it will spread out much wider than that of course. But if you went along to a farmers' market people are there because they want to buy and connect with the grower of that food. They want to know that that food has been grown carefully in their region somewhere nearby that they can look the person in the eye that has dealt with that food and know and have some confidence that there has been a lot of hard effort gone into that and that they are not being sold something that won't meet their expectations in terms of quality and provenance.I think that has been forgotten a lot in our fast-moving consumer goods world. I think the supermarkets while they've been such a massive change in the way that we consume—you go back from when they were first introduced I think it was in the 1970s in New Zealand. It was a massive change from the local greengrocer and butcher and so on. Now we tend to buy most of our food from one outlet but there is a massive move for people to get back to buying food locally and to having that connection with the consumer.This is another extension to allow food to be labelled with the country of origin and it's not a foreign thing. As I mentioned in my second reading speech it's of course par for the course in terms of the wine industry—so Burgundy and Bordeaux and Champagne I gave as examples. They're quite famous names in the wine industry which are all regions in France. Champagne of course is what you would associate with sparkling wine. We call it sparkling wine because we're not allowed to call it champagne. That's the law. It's the law to sell wine into the EU. It has to have if you want to give it an origin the region it's grown in as well as the country that it's grown in. So it's well known. It hasn't done the wine industry any harm.We can think of gouda cheese for example. There are others cheeses like Saint-Marcellin Livarot and other cheeses which all go back to the particular region that they are grown in. So this bill builds on that. It has a great history for it. I think well done to Steffan for introducing it well done to Gareth Hughes for taking it over. It's with pleasure that I commend it."