Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Assistant Speaker. Thank you. Speaking on behalf of the Green Party on the National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill I think the comment of the previous speaker the Rt Hon David Carter that the Minister should have fixed this up ages ago is very unfair because of the huge effort that Minister Damien O'Connor and the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) and Biosecurity New Zealand have been putting into dealing with the outbreak. The number of public meetings that have been held around the country and the amount of activity on-farm to actually try and eradicate this disease has been significant. So the focus has been on that activity rather than on doing the changes here. That said however there is a huge amount of effort going into implementing the recommendations of the review and nearly 30 of those have already been implemented. There is the commitment to bring further legislative changes back to the House. The Green Party is supporting this bill on the understanding that it was a drafting anomaly in the original Act in 2012 and that this bill is simply correcting that anomaly. My understanding is that a search warrant under the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) Act must be in a particular form and that at the moment regulations need to be passed to enable that to happen. The bill is removing that requirement so again that is a process issue. The fact that this bill is making the NAIT legislation consistent with the Search and Surveillance Act is providing the powers to officers that are consistent with those that other agencies have. So at the moment under the NAIT Act you can already have warrantless inspections and searches. A NAIT officer can already enter and inspect a place without a warrant to determine whether that person's complying with the Act so it's the anomaly in the drafting that they can't undertake their usual activities like taking photographs like requesting a person to assist with entry and search and like copying documents which means that that's the reason for this bill to align it with the search and surveillance provisions. So this power is already there; it's just the drafting anomalies. I have listened carefully to the Hon Amy Adams and her speech but the assurances that the Green Party has been given through the Minister are that this is simply correcting a drafting anomaly. I think what we have seen with MPI's work on M. bovis is that there are some major compliance challenges—that animals are being moved from one location to another without the proper identification—and that that increases the risk of spread of the disease. So those compliance issues should have been dealt with by the previous Government. What we've seen under this Government is a significant increase in infringement notices. Some 39 have been issued in recent months compared to one notice in the entire five years before that. Operational Solutions for Primary Industries New Zealand which is the organisation charged with implementing NAIT has done a really good job on TB and on getting TB infection rates down. Movement control is a critical part of doing that but the whole NAIT system has been very poorly implemented. If New Zealand is going to get on top of this disease and if we're not going to face the billion-dollar cost which its spreading would entail to our primary sector we need stronger compliance and enforcement provisions. That is what this bill does so the Green Party is supporting it. No it's not going to a select committee but our understanding is that this is correcting drafting anomalies. Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker.