Browning SteffanSTEFFAN BROWNING (Green): As I rise to speak to the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill I recall the questions I asked the Minister for the Environment this afternoon in question time around some of the issues with some of the ingredients in some of the pesticides. Among these ingredients one has got the name polyethoxylated tallow amine—it is much easier to say POEA. POEA the Minister's office tells me is in 69 of 91 glyphosate-based herbicides in this country but our community does not know which ones. This bill unfortunately wraps that up potentially even more. Instead of having 5 years when formulations and the data around them have some data-protection and civil society cannot have access to that relying on the regulators only this bill extends that out to 10 years—10 years when civil society including those people in our environmental organisations in our food safety-type organisations and individuals themselves who have the aptitude and interest to get in to look at these things cannot get that. The bill says: Hey we rely on our EPA we rely on the Ministry for Primary Industries to give us that good decision around the safety of these things." Well as you heard today the Minister says he has got full faith in the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) full faith in the agencies to be getting these decisions right and he does not intend to have POEA pulled from use in New Zealand. In fact he was saying that we need to have more pesticides. POEA is even more toxic than glyphosate the principal ingredient in glyphosate-based herbicides and it is in 69 of them. It is in more than 75 percent of glyphosate-based herbicides in this country and this bill is gearing up to make it even harder for the community to know which ones. I am hoping for the Minister to tell me how the community is to find out which ones have POEA in them when this Government does not appear to want to remove that from the streets and parks and the food systems of this country even though the European Commission has recommended that all EU States remove it—several have already and others are in train to. Why can we not have that in New Zealand? Why can members of our community not even make the decision to say: "I'm not going to use that product because this stuff is in it and we know that it is exceptionally toxic."? If we want to rely on the regulators—well I think we need to reconsider that. That is all the more reason why the community must have access to full data. I will use as an example the EPA coming to councils to ask them what the issue is with these glyphosate-based herbicides that they are hearing about which the Greens and other community groups are campaigning on to get them out their food systems out of their streets out of their children's playgrounds and out of the parks. So what does it do? The EPA commissioned someone to review the finding of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that glyphosate was probably carcinogenic—"Review that." So this one individual goes out to review it—[Bell rung] Mr Chair.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I will certainly give the next call to the speaker. I want him to connect more closely the content of his speech to the current bill that is before the Committee and under discussion around innovation. Thank you.Hon Ruth Dyson: Getting dangerously like clever Mr Chairman.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I will take that cautionary note on the chin.STEFFAN BROWNING: Thank you Mr Chair. This is relevant to the bill in that there is an amendment coming and I will speak to that more individually but what we are talking about here is how this bill applies and why it should not be 10 years of data protection. I am saying it should not be 10 years of data protection because for one our regulators are not checking out the safety enough for our community to be safe. I am using that story that example which is current—it is very recent—to show why our regulators are failing us and why we must go back down to having no more than 5 years of data protection. That is because that single reviewer whom the EPA decided was going to be able to find against 17 focused toxicologists from IARC for the World Health Organization (WHO). And what did it do? It went looking at the European Food Safety Authority's outputs it looked at another group called the Joint Meeting on Pesticide Residues (JMPR) the joint pesticides group of the WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and it used the data—or the decisions—that they had used to break down what those 17 toxicologists had found. This information—I need to go on with it—does reflect on the data protection. So it referred to the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment which actually says the testing of formulations should not be used for toxicological evaluation of active substances because co-formulants may extensively alter the outcome. So it is saying: "Don't look at the full formulation; just look at a principal ingredient." These guys are not looking after the safety of their communities and nor is our reviewer when they go using that as an example. The other review that the reviewer was told to do by the EPA was to look at the European Food Safety Authority. The European Food Safety Authority concluded that the genotoxic potential of such complete formulations should be further assessed. It actually acknowledged that there might be risk around carcinogenicity through the genotoxicity in there. But what did our EPA reviewer say in the end? That it probably was not carcinogenic. I could go on at length on that and I will not because I do not want to concern you on that Mr Chair but what I am saying is we cannot rely on our EPA or on the Ministry for Primary Industries and yet our Minister of Health relies on both of them to get it right. What we are saying here or what this bill is saying is that we are going to wrap up the information about this for 10 years—10 years. That stuff is causing significant harm to communities internationally. The European Commission knows that. It says: "Ban it." We say: "Give them 10 years' more data-protection and don't remove it. Don't remove it—we can trust our EPA." We cannot trust our EPA—we cannot trust our EPA. I have got a list here of those herbicides. I get a lot of flak every time I mention glyphosate. The same reviewer who reviewed for the EPA he did that on DDT—the same reviewer. Where is DDT now? He did it on endosulfan—where is endosulfan now? He did the same damn thing. He has done it on glyphosate using industry science—four out of five of the papers that he refers to were supplied by Monsanto-paid researchers. You may laugh your bits off Todd Barclay but the community is not laughing. The community wants this out of here. Thank you."