Woodhouse Michael: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Woodhouse Michael: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 07 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6369. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) 
: 
 A couple of weeks ago I had cause to go to the dictionary after an interjection by David Parker on the Prime Minister when the Prime Minister was talking about jobs in manufacturing. Mr Parker interjected that the figure that the Prime Minister was using included agriculture and therefore it somehow did not count as manufacturing. So I went to Wikipedia and I found that indeed manufacturing is the production of goods or services. It could be handicraft to high tech but it is certainly not limited to steel construction. But that seems to be the attitude of a certain member from Dunedin—the negative down in the mouth glass half-empty member for South Dunedin—because when we went to Dunedin last week she issued a press release before we had even done anything actually saying that Key had front to go down to Dunedin and suggest that there was no manufacturing crisis. In fact he never said any such thing in all of that trip but what we did do I think was acknowledge that there are challenges in manufacturing. 
But the Government does not have the luxury of focusing on just the negative things. It actually has that tough job of focusing on the positive things that are going on in the manufacturing industry. On Tuesday with David Carter I met with some exporters in Dunedin and also the owner of Cowell’s Genuine Pavlova. This is a great little organisation in Dunedin that I claim makes the best pavlovas in the country. My colleague Craig Foss— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: That’s true. 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE 
: Well my colleague Craig Foss actually disagrees with me but I would suggest that Cowell’s is the No. 1 and it would normally employ about eight people. At the moment to manage the Christmas rush it has 21 staff madly filling the orders and most of those pavlovas are going to end up in Australia. Talk about selling coals to Newcastle! This great little company is now exporting pavlova to Australia. 
The Prime Minister and I started our trip last week at a great wee company in North Taieri the New Zealand Honey Co. Faced with competition from bulk commodity product coming in from China it had a choice. It could either compete add value or fold and it decided to compete. It is a Deloitte Fast 50 winner from 2009 or 2010 and it is now exporting millions of dollars’ worth of value-added honey products into the UK and China. 
We then went on and visited Speights Brewery that great brewery in Dunedin. While the Canterbury earthquake rebuild posed some serious challenges for the Dunedin workforce in losing its workers at Speights it is going the other way. There are actually workers coming down from Canterbury Draught and millions of dollars being invested in the production line at Speights Brewery and I understand it has announced just today the takeover of Emerson’s Brewery a fantastic boutique brewery in Dunedin. That could create export opportunities. What it will certainly do is put capital into the city for those fantastic people the Emersons to look at other investment opportunities. And we did go to some steel manufacturing. We went to Farra’s a 140-year-old company— 
Hon Craig Foss 
: Are they busy? 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE 
: Yes they are. They are struggling but they are growing in revenue they are growing jobs and they are growing new markets. When the PM asked them: “If the challenges faced by the Hillside workshops resulted in further job losses would they and the engineering cluster in Dunedin be able to pick them up?” the simple answer was: “Absolutely yes.” So manufacturing is not just about steel and certainly in Dunedin it is not just about what is done in Hillside Road. 
But I will say this about the member for Dunedin South. She has come out in support of responsible oil and gas exploration in the southern Canterbury Bight off the coast of Dunedin. 
Hon Craig Foss 
: Really? 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE 
: Well it is not surprising that you would say “Really?” because she has been very quiet about it. No ads in the paper the way the rest of the chamber of commerce members were doing welcoming Anadarko. No bold statements that say yes there could be challenges at Hillside but there are also opportunities in the city. None of that but she has quietly said that yes she does support oil and gas exploration. I think she needs to be braver about that and do what the other city leaders in Dunedin and the other MPs—certainly the National MPs in the south Jacqui Dean and myself—are doing and say to Anadarko and Shell: “Bring it on. Explore. Do it responsibly do it safely but certainly contribute to the manufacturing and export opportunities that do exist in Dunedin despite the challenges.”