Hague Kevin: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill Biosecurity Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Hague Kevin: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill Biosecurity Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
[Advance Copy - Subject to minor change before inclusion in Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to take a brief call on the Customs and Excise Amendment Bill and Biosecurity Amendment Bill. As returning members to this House are aware biosecurity is a bit of a passion of mine. We are an island nation; our biodiversity in this nation is entirely unique in the world. If we lose it here we lose it everywhere in the world and thus we have a duty as custodians—not only for that magnificent natural heritage for our own sakes and for its own sake but also on behalf of the world—to look after that heritage. But that unique biodiversity that New Zealanders love and want to protect is also crucially important to our economy. Tourism is our No. 1 industry and the tourists come here because of that natural biodiversity. So the stakes around biodiversity and protecting it are extraordinarily high. Likewise our other major industries tend to be trading industries and in particular trading of primary products. Those industries too are extraordinarily vulnerable to imported threats. So getting biosecurity right is fundamentally important to our nation and to our economy. 
In the debates on a succession of biosecurity bills that the Government progressed through the last term of Parliament I spoke about a couple of major things. One was the level of risk that was posed by getting biosecurity wrong and the other was around the changes that were being made particularly at the border—as we are addressing in this bill—that we were also getting wrong as a nation. The risks are extraordinary. If we think about a single piece of fruit infected with fruit fly coming into this country the cost of that single piece of fruit is estimated to be $800 million in the first year alone and to cost 5000 jobs in the Bay of Plenty alone. We are talking very high stakes—foot-and-mouth higher still—and yet our border measures are not keeping pace with those threats. They are not proportional to those threats. The latest number I have is from 2009. 
 Approaching 400000 loaded containers coming into New Zealand each year are not inspected at the border—400000. That is an extraordinarily cavalier approach to something that potentially has such major impacts on our country and on our economy yet the Government’s direction around that interface between customs and biosecurity has been going in the wrong direction. Biosecurity is inevitably a process. It starts in the country of origin it comes through border control measures and it progresses into post-border mechanisms in the event of incursions. All of that is important but what the Government has been doing has been weakening the bit that goes around the border which is entirely the wrong thing to do. We have seen the budget cuts we have seen the reduction in staff numbers in biosecurity and we have seen the adoption of an approach in biosecurity based on risk profiling which means fewer people actually being checked. When that was trialled in fact those who were not profiled for inspection were found to be bringing in significant threats. So the direction of travel is wrong. 
Thankfully this bill is not fundamentally enacting that machinery and we are happy to support it—for the dogs alone; that is enough for me. One last caution: the main thing that this bill does is facilitate information sharing. In the last 2 weeks we have seen a State agency that is fundamentally concerned with the confidentiality of information getting it entirely wrong. These two agencies need to really step up their game to get it right.