O'Connor DamienNATIONAL ANIMAL IDENTIFICATION AND TRACING AMENDMENT BILL (NO 2)Third ReadingHon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Minister for Biosecurity): I move That the National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a third time.Look it is indeed a good day for the farming sector for rural New Zealand that we can pass two quite valuable pieces of legislation. I won't say they are absolutely necessary but they will make a huge difference to farmers on the ground. Farming is a vital part of our economy and will be for a long long time: over $46 billion in wealth creation comes into this country to go around in our economy and pass benefits on to most New Zealanders in some way or another. A national animal tracing system is necessary for modern farm production systems and this system was brought in under the previous Government. It was a little slow it was a little reluctant and it took some time to bed in. And then of course in coming into Government and just prior to the last election I guess the previous Government had discovered that we had Mycoplasma bovis in this country. And then when we set about a programme committed to eradication we faced the reality of a system that wasn't operating as it should. I'm not blaming anyone in particular for that other than I guess we have now faced the reality and the realisation that without a proper tracing system we can't claim to be good farmers. That's the reality and we certainly can't eradicate diseases like Mycoplasma bovis or anything else that might come into this country. The National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill (No 2) and its five accompanying regulation changes will improve traceability. It will incentivise compliance with the system and will encourage effective and efficient use of National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) data and ensure that the NAIT framework is fit for the future. I'll focus on a few of the issues that were raised in submissions and I know that the Primary Production Committee—and I'd like to acknowledge the select committee. As with the previous piece of legislation I think they gave this a thorough investigation. They listened to submissions and they made some technical changes that I think in the most part make the legislation a whole lot better and that's great. There was one issue around tagging animals. What had become I guess a bad habit for farmers is that they would put animals on the truck and send them to the works. They would pay a nominal fine of about $35 I think and it would save them the effort I guess of tagging animals and that habit then transferred through into the transfer of animals from one farm to another. The point is that we need to ensure that everything that can be done is done to tag animals and properly trace them when they're moving from a farm. There was an exemption because the reality is some animals are so big and it becomes dangerous and awkward to tag them and so farmers would just opt to pay the $35. We accept that there will be some situations where it's unsafe to tag animals where a farmer could be in real danger if he or she was to attempt it. And so that has been clarified in the legislation: not just impracticable to tag" which was the terminology before; it now becomes "unsafe to tag" in regulation 5(3) of the National Animal Identification and Tracing (Levies) Regulations as set out in Part 2 of Schedule 3. So it's a slightly higher discipline on people to try and tag animals before they're shifted off a property. The next issue is compliance. There have been discussions around the privacy laws and its relationship to NAIT and farmers' rights and the issue of being able to find out where an animal might have come from through the tag system was blocked by so-called privacy provisions. What we've done is made some changes to ensure that "a prospective buyer will be able to ask the seller to provide the location history of a NAIT animal" and then NAIT Ltd will make it easy for the seller to access the animal's location history. In that way a farmer can find out whether the animal may have come from a property that was in some way connected to a disease outbreak or some other—perhaps it was some other relationship or connection or reputational issue with a property that they didn't want to buy animals from. That way this issue will allow farmers who are buying stock to track them. The third point was run around infringement fees. And what we found out is that we need to align the infringement fees with other pieces of legislation like the Biosecurity Act and Animal Products Act because while it was seen as a minor offence not to tag an animal if you can't track an animal that may be diseased then the cost implications of that could be huge. And so we're just going to align the infringement fees with the other legislation. The next issue—and I want to go through these—is that other penalties that can now be laid down by a judge should a prosecution go through court will be shifted up to a maximum of $200000 which is a huge fee. But when we are talking about perhaps a billion-dollar cost to try and eradicate M. bovis then we want to incentivise everyone in the system to do everything they can to have a proper animal tracing system and do their bit and these penalties certainly will incentivise better behaviour I would suggest.The next issue was one of transporters and because animals are carted not on the back of people but on the back of trucks the question of whether truck drivers or truck companies should be liable for the shifting of animals that don't have proper tags was canvassed and kicked around by the select committee. I think we've come up with a reasonable solution to that one and said if there's a declaration saying that there is an exemption to allow those animals to go on the truck then the truck driver is not liable for that. And I accept that in the interim; I think that's a fair compromise. It may have to be looked at in the future when technology allows better traceability. There was another: access to core data. We have police and other territorial authorities who might come across an animal. They want to find out who it belongs to. These authorities now will have access to information. They'll be able to go online and find out who owns the animal—pretty logical really.Overall I have to say that this will bring NAIT a huge step forward into a situation of the scheme being fit for purpose and ready for any future developments that may emerge. This is an essential part of the future of farming in this country and we need to ensure that the legislation governing NAIT does give effect to as I say what we want and that's proper animal tracing. I want to thank the select committee once again. I thank everyone who's been involved in this and I commit the bill to the House."