Hoggard AndrewHon ANDREW HOGGARD (Minister for Biosecurity): Thank you Madam Speaker. On behalf of the ACT Party I speak in support of the New Zealand - EU free-trade deal. As a trading nation such deals are absolutely vital for New Zealand's interests. Over the years New Zealand officials and trade Ministers—I recognise Todd McClay and Damien O'Connor here—have done a stellar job in progressing trade opportunities with numerous countries.We want to thank the officials for their hard work in what has been a particularly challenging negotiation. It is great to see that we have gotten tariff-free access for a number of sectors including kiwifruit honey seafood and onions. It is disappointing however that we could not get access for meat and dairy exports at such a level. This agreement contains enough great provisions. For the ACT Party we would like to see that when appropriate the Government looks at insurance seeking to ensure that we get meaningful access for our two largest primary sectors. We want to thank the EU for ratifying this agreement. Having spent a bit of time with French German and other European farmers I know this will have undoubtedly been very challenging for their negotiators as well as ours.Recent times have seen a rise in protectionism and insular thinking so it is good that we are able to keep moving the dial forward on freeing markets up. I know that around the world particularly those farming and growing often see free trade as a threat. I would take this time to stress that the biggest challenge for farmers that I see around the world is price volatility.I recall during the dairy downturn of 2014-17 work that was done internationally showed that interfering in the market might well delay the impact but that impact still came and the recovery took longer than it needed to. This work showed that most countries' domestic price will follow the world price. For countries like New Zealand that lag was generally non-existent; for others it might be up to eight or nine months or longer but the domestic price did eventually follow. The lag then resulted in mixed market signals which then resulted in a longer time that the market spent in that trough. Open markets result in market signals being received earlier actions taken quicker and the troughs and the peaks of the marketplace get smoothed out.In the example of dairy that I'm very familiar with at the time of that downturn I mentioned New Zealand had access to around 13 percent of world consumption at tariff rates less than 10 percent. Effectively what that 13 percent represents is the freely traded world market which pretty much sets the world price. So when we had additional production occurring in that remaining 87 percent of world consumption basically everything was trying to be squeezed into that 13 percent which meant that the impact on world price was much bigger than if that additional production was spread across the entire 100 percent of world consumption. Volatility is the enemy of farmers all around the world—not each other—and New Zealand should strive through high-quality trade deals to show the way forward. Finally to those that might argue that freer trade doesn't equally benefit all of New Zealand all I would say is that when our rural sectors are able to get better returns for our products the benefit flows through to all our local communities. Right now times are tough for our lamb producers up and down this country. It's not just them suffering but all those businesses that sell products and services to them affecting how much they can spend in other local businesses and how many people they can employ. By earning less for our export products it limits what we as a nation can buy offshore such as medicines and all those other items that make the modern world go around.We all benefit from free trade. So in that we support this bill. It might not deliver all that we hope for but it's a good start. Thank you.