Norman Russel William: Biosecurity Law Reform Bill — First Reading 
Norman Russel William: Biosecurity Law Reform Bill — First Reading 
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Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I rise to speak on behalf of the Green Party on the Biosecurity Law Reform Bill. The Green Party strongly supports the statement in the explanatory note of this bill: “Biosecurity is critical to New Zealand’s prosperity and way of life. More than any other developed country New Zealand depends on the success of its primary industries and the biosecurity system that underpins them. The biosecurity system also protects the native plants and animals and other resources that are taonga to Maori and precious to all New Zealanders.” We are now used to hearing about biosecurity incursions into New Zealand on a pretty regular basis: Psa varroa mite didymo kauri dieback disease Undaria painted apple moth southern saltmarsh mosquito and so on. The incursions we have already had have cost us hugely but these are nothing compared to some of the risks that we need to guard against: foot-and-mouth disease for example or various fruit flies as Horticulture New Zealand warned yesterday. In the face of these major threats there is no doubt that our old Biosecurity Act was no longer fit for purpose and the Green Party welcomes this attempt to bring it up to speed.  
We support most of the provisions of the bill. The biosecurity information database and the national policy direction from the Minister for Biosecurity are good common-sense measures. We particularly welcome the extension of our biosecurity regime to our full exclusive economic zone consistent with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and ratification of the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments. One of the limitations of our existing unsophisticated biosecurity measures is that we worry most about what we can see. My colleague Kevin Hague has often spoken in the House about the near complete absence of adequate measures for responding to risks from microscopic organisms. The same principle applies to places that we do not usually see such as remote terrestrial areas and underwater environments distant from our shores. 
We have mixed feelings and look forward to hearing the submissions about the provisions for distributed responsibility for biosecurity management. A more cooperative approach has some potential to extend the biosecurity net and improve outcomes but it also has the potential to blur lines of responsibility and carries many of the conflict-of-interest risks of self-policing.  
The bill also codifies the Government’s current approach of targeted risk management and in some ways this is the nub of the bill. With an inevitably limited budget and potentially uncapped risk targeting resources to the highest risks is the only approach to take. In 2009 about 104 loaded incoming shipping containers were checked for biosecurity risks each day. That is about 9 percent of those coming into the country leaving about 386850 shipping containers unchecked over the course of a year. Maybe the highest-risk 9 percent are checked—they certainly should be—but that is a huge amount of uncontrolled risk. It is also essential but absent from the bill that we act to minimise risk by minimising the import of goods that pose risk. Again as the bill’s explanatory note states: “Globalisation and changes in transport technologies have resulted in greater and more rapid trade and travel and the development of new trade and travel routes. While this is positive for New Zealand’s economy it exposes us to greater and more complex biosecurity risk.” The Green Party says that that is an unacceptable approach. The Government proposes no measures at all to try to reduce let alone minimise the biosecurity risk.  
In fact the situation is even worse than that. The bill explicitly makes biosecurity law subject to the limitations of international trade agreements. That provision is in new section 100G(5)(e). The clause talks about imposing levies for the purposes of having pest-management plans. Pest-management plans are the plans for the eradication management of pests. These can be either national or regional. The Government has given itself the power to impose a levy for the purpose of funding a pest-management plan but it has made it explicitly clear that we cannot actually introduce such a levy if it is in breach of our international trade agreements. This means that the Government’s free-trade agenda not only poses increasing risk that we need to try to deal with because of ever-increasing volumes of imports all of which could carry pest species but also will compromise New Zealand’s ability to respond to that risk in our own domestic biosecurity law. 
That means that despite the good things that the bill would achieve the surrender of our biosecurity sovereignty which the Government proposes means that we cannot possibly support it. The increasing trade volumes and therefore the biosecurity risk associated with free-trade agreements are well known and they will be looked back on as a kind of collective madness. Our free-trade agreement with China has already delivered 77 percent of imported shoes containing fungi bacteria and plant material and garlic infested with fungi. We now have free-trade agreements with countries where foot-and-mouth disease is endemic. This bill proposes to limit our ability to take all possible steps to combat the inevitably increasing risk from those countries. A foot-and-mouth incursion could cost 20000 jobs and reduce GDP by $10 billon over 2 years. The stakes are very high indeed and we need to face them without a hand tied behind our backs.  
This is not the first area where the Government’s headlong rush to embrace free-trade agreements has been identified as posing an erosion of New Zealand’s sovereignty by limiting our ability to determine domestic law. One could think about the current Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations which include Malaysia. Malaysia has foot-and-mouth disease and we currently import palm kernel expeller from Malaysia in huge quantities. Upwards of many thousands of tonnes of palm kernel expeller come in from Malaysia. Foot-and-mouth disease can be dormant in soil and can be carried in soil. The palm kernel expeller in Malaysia sits on the ground and then is scooped up with large amounts of soil before it is loaded in ships and sent to New Zealand. So our exposure to foot-and-mouth via palm kernel expeller is quite real and is actually a genuine biosecurity risk. However this bill says that New Zealand cannot introduce levies to manage these kinds of risks if they breach our free-trade agreements. This bill says that whatever we sign up to in the Trans-Pacific Partnership will restrict our own ability to pass sovereign domestic biosecurity law.  
The Green Party will participate constructively in the select committee process to help improve the bill and looks forward to hearing the submissions from the New Zealand public. But we tell the House now that we will not support a bill that compromises New Zealand’s ability to do everything possible to protect this country from biosecurity risks and threats and neither should any other party. The New Zealand that would be the logical result of this bill’s preparedness to compromise biosecurity in the interests of free-trade agreements is one of globalised pests diminished biodiversity and the faded degraded greyness of the globally standard environment—not our future.