Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. The National Party is proud of our food producers because our farmers and our growers have supported this country through COVID. The PM spoke today about healthy food for families. Well news to the people on the other side of the room: the healthy food comes from our farmers and growers. We keep getting a question from the other side of the House: what is the National Party going to cut? Well the National Party is going to cut the red tape that this Government has forced on to our food producers because when we talk about the cost of living we're talking about the cost of living of our healthy fruit and vegetables and proteins rising in price in New Zealand due to the red tape that's been pushed on those producers by this Government. So the red tape is increasing the cost of living. When you think about what's happened over the last couple of years yes we've had to close the borders because we've had COVID but we've had completely COVID-free people who could have come to this country and picked fruit and what did this Government do? They prevented them. They took away their income they took away our growers' ability to pick the fruit and they let it rot on the ground and then they have the gall to talk about everything else in the world causing inflation. Look we all regret and are very saddened about the war that's going on with Russia on Ukraine at the moment but the Government talks about this as if it's the only cause of inflation. Inflation was at 5.9 percent before this war started and it's always the world's fault. The Prime Minister is always waxing lyrical about it being the world's fault. Well take some accountability Government because some of this can be sheeted back on your own Government. So I think the other thing that this Government needs to realise is that we all want good policy in the area of climate change but the obsession that the Government has of banning and taxing and going through climate change objectives in a way that just pushes the price up is also adding to the cost of living. We know now in energy what's happening with gas prices and the Commerce Commission has said it's perfectly OK to raise the price of gas because the assets don't have an expected life that they did have thank you to the policy of this Government. Well no thank you to the policy of this Government. We also know that they're pushing the price up on food producers by charging a ute tax. Now we all know that even if there was a ute available those utes would be powered by electricity that was fuelled by Indonesian coal. So the nuclear-free moment so called by the Prime Minister of the oil and gas ban has actually become an Indonesian coal moment and it's not doing anything for our climate change and I suspect that's probably what this Government would push our food producers to if they're given any more chance which is why the public is not going to give them any more chance in 2023. I haven't seen anything from this Government. We've got 3-nitrooxypropanol products that would reduce methane. The applications are sitting on the desk of the Environmental Protection Authority and I haven't heard the Government encouraging those to be brought in. We have rye grasses in other parts of the world that can reduce methane that we're currently not able to use in New Zealand due to our regulation. Where has the Minister of Agriculture's support for those been? Missing. The research and development—there's a lot of carbon and we could increase our carbon sequestration in our soils. Where's the science? Where's the conversation around that? All we hear is about ban it tax it and all the rest of it. We never hear about any R & D and we hear a lot from the conservation Minister about jobs for nature. Well guess what? We've got some very very very good people out there who do their own jobs for nature. They are called farmers. They do it out of the willingness of their heart and they do it out of the cost of their own pocket and they are improving the environment day by day. Thank you Mr Speaker.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.