Adams AmyHon AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn): Thank you Mr Speaker. I do want to take just a brief call this evening on this final reading of the Farm Debt Mediation Bill (No 2). I want to start by doing two things I never thought I'd do in my time in this House. The first is commend New Zealand First for their leadership on this piece of policy. In my dying days in my career who knew that would happen? But the second is even less likely and that's that I want to acknowledge David Bennett's chairmanship on the committee which is something I also never thought I would say.But when I made the decision to step down at the next election and we had a bit of a rearrangement I found myself on the—[Interruption] Mr Speaker can you tell my colleagues to be quiet behind me. Ha ha!ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Be quiet.Hon AMY ADAMS: I found myself on the Primary Production Committee. I also found myself with an immense amount of time suddenly on my hands. Anyone who's been a busy Minister knows that you don't quite know what to do when the work isn't coming in by the bucket load. So the poor old officials on the Farm Debt Mediation Bill (No 2) found that I'd turned up to the first committee having read every word of that sucker and having a long list of changes that I thought needed to be made which I proceeded to share with them in my usual manner.Actually I do think we've made the bill considerably better and I think it was a very good collaborative process across the committee. What was very clear though is that farmers are under an immense amount of financial pressure right now. That might seem incongruous given the fact that we do have good commodity prices but in actual fact the banks are putting an immense amount of pressure on farmers and there are a whole range of reasons—from the foreign buyer ban to the Reserve Bank changes to the Basel changes: the recent capital adequacy proposals. There's no question that farmers are feeling that heat.One of the big areas that I certainly focused on in the committee which we've made some good traction on I think is to emphasise that a mediation process when you're at the point of a mortgagee sale is too little too late. If we're not sitting down between the creditor and debtor early on in that distress process when there's still an opportunity to make changes then the realistic ability to help farmers get their way back into profitability is significantly lessened. So we worked a lot on that and I think the bill is far better for it. There are changes that should have been made. I personally think there should still have been an exemption for low-value goods. It would be a nonsense to trigger processes like this because the hire purchase on the beer fridge in the sheriff's quarters got behind but none the less that's what this bill currently says despite our best endeavours.There are other issues though and it's come to my knowledge that the rural tax advisory group have raised real concerns about tax implications for farmers should there be loan write-offs. As far as I'm aware there has been no advice certainly to the committee from officials. I don't know if the Minister has had advice on it. That is a serious implication that we would certainly need farmers to be well-advised on. So I certainly want to encourage the Minister through his officials to make sure that that issue is very much looked into and advice around that is included in the information that goes to farmers involved in the process because nobody wants to put out one fire and then start a tax fire somewhere else. So with those words I'm happy to commend the bill to the House.