Brooking RachelRACHEL BROOKING (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'm delighted to take a call on this Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill.I was very pleased to be in the House for the Hon Jacqui Dean's first speech on this bill—and I'll be here for her second one—and her description of a Saturday morning if you are an Otago- or Southland-based MP because it was entirely accurate. In terms of you wake up on a Saturday morning and quickly go to the Otago Daily Times website to see what Southern Say has said. It's not always good. But I was delighted to read the particular Southern Say article that the Hon Jacqui Dean just quoted from because of course Mike Houlahan was quite right. This is a simple bill but it's an important one. He explained it very well.From listening to the other speeches in the House tonight as well I have learnt that I need to start watching that border control programme. It sounds very interesting indeed. It's something I've been missing out on.Of course this is important because biosecurity is so important to New Zealand. There's two main reasons why it's so important and we've heard that from the other speakers as well. One of them is because agriculture—the primary sector—is of course the backbone of the country as we've heard from other speakers. We've got over $50 billion of export earnings from that sector estimated for this year. Of course it's just incredibly important not only for our own food security but for that of the world. Some of our colleagues often say in this House that we can feed 40 million people and that's important.Of course the other reason why biosecurity is so important—well why is biosecurity important to agriculture? It can of course destroy it. We've heard just then from Sarah Pallett about her experience in the UK with foot-and-mouth disease. We've been lucky—well not just lucky; we've put a lot of money a lot of investment a lot of laws like this into avoiding things like foot-and-mouth because it can shut down the entire country. We saw those pictures in Britain in the early 2000s I think of the fires of those animals being burnt and the trauma that that caused for the communities that live there. It was a horrible time and not anything we want which is of course why so much money has been put into M. bovis and to do that bold move in the past Government to try and exterminate it or eradicate it because it has such dire consequences for our economy in that case.The other arm of why biodiversity is so important is our indigenous flora and fauna. We know at the moment we've got myrtle rust. It's a big problem. We don't actually know how it got into the country. It might have been through some fruit from Australia or it might have been on the wind. It's a fungal issue. But these different pests whether they are an animal or a fungi can do great harm to our quite unusual indigenous biodiversity that of course we want to protect.It's for those reasons that we care about biosecurity and we don't want these things to come into our country. So that is of course what this bill does. It's trying to dissuade people incentivise people to not bring in what was a $400 tomato and is now a $1000 tomato. We've heard quite a lot about that change to the schedule which makes the change from $400 to $1000 in Part 3 of the bill. But it's also important to note that sections 109 and 157 of the Immigration Act are amended and that is where people don't comply with the directions or a request made by a biosecurity officer. That is then something that becomes an offence and it has got stronger standing than it does at the moment. So I think those would be good issues for the select committee to look at and I commend this bill to the House.