Meager James; Kuriger BarbaraJAMES MEAGER (National—Rangitata): Madam Speaker thank you very much. I'd like to begin my contribution tonight as we enter what was just described as the graveyard shift—or the circus shift—with the acknowledgement of Stuart Smith for his bill. We had the new co-leader of the Green Party give him a promotion to the honourable Stuart Smith" and I think that's the closest we're going to come to a blue-green coalition for a couple of years. So I'll take that as we can as a start there Stuart. No congratulations. Like the member Greg O'Connor this is your second member's bill that you've brought forward to the House so I'd just like to say congratulations but please give someone else a chance next time as well.Actually like Mr O'Connor I'd like to acknowledge your contribution to the committee throughout the consideration of this bill. You yourself brought a range of lived experience not only as a consumer but also as a producer from one of the best wine regions around the country. Actually we had Jamie Arbuckle on the committee as well from that region—from Marlborough—and Todd Stephenson with us too. We had many many submitters appear before us from Marlborough and from Central Otago. It was a little bit of a love-in at one point. Then of course I would like to acknowledge Celia Wade-Brown who joined us for a portion of the consideration as well and who was of course from the Wairarapa which is another well-known wine-growing region—home of the mighty Mike Butterick.Can I acknowledge also what has now become known as the "busy and effective" Justice Committee and I thank the committee for their hard work in taking two bills off our workflow. But we still have 10 on the go and I'm looking forward to looking to Tracey McLellan's bill in a couple of weeks and seeing if we can add another one to our workflow as well. It's interesting because I sat on the Education and Workforce Committee this morning subbing in and they had their very first departmental report to consider for the session. So it was a bit like a proud dad seeing his kids take the training wheels off their bike as we plough through item number 10 on our legislative agenda.So I'd just like to acknowledge the Justice Committee. It is a busy committee. We enjoy the work. I think we do work very very well together as a committee—representatives from all parties—and I think you can see in this bill that we've done a decent amount of work to get it to this stage. The member himself acknowledged that members' bills will often come to select committees with limited resources behind them in how they're produced and it's our job as a committee to work together to try and find the ways that we can to improve them. That's the important scrutiny function that select committees perform so I just wanted to acknowledge that.Finally can I acknowledge the contribution before from the Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick who indicated that the Greens would be supporting the bill. I thank her for that. I was curious as to why she was supporting this because there's been some I think quite reasonable apprehension from the Greens in the past around alcohol legislation and the harm minimisation requirements need to be in that. Then I looked at the back page of the departmental report and saw that the Waiheke Wine Growers Association had made a very powerful submission. So it goes to show that submitters big and small from all over the country can make an influence on how we consider pieces of legislation like this.Finally can I just acknowledge the officials from the Ministry of Justice. It is important to acknowledge them especially when we have members' bills. They are giving up their time off the Government's legislative agenda to support us and be our advisers through that process. They provided us with very clear advice on some relatively tricky issues—in fact some which we as Dr Webb alluded to earlier on haven't quite come to a conclusion on about whether or not we've reached the right drafting around some of those potential loopholes. But I do acknowledge the clear and consistent work that they gave to us.Now I'd like to talk briefly about the purpose of the bill. Like most members' bills the purpose is very simple: it is to make it easier for winery cellar doors to charge for samples—and that's simply it. Actually I wanted to talk about the scoping issue that has come up in the select committee report because—and we had a bit of back and forth at length about this with the member in charge. But what was the purpose of the bill? The member was very clear: the purpose of him bringing this bill forward was to address an issue faced by winery cellar-door operators and the issues that they face with the complicated licensing regime under the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act.There were submissions from other players in the alcohol industry—I think the Brewers Association made some very very good points about whether the bill could be expanded to include the likes of your craft beer brewers or your gin distilleries which could also possibly open up their own version of a cellar door. But for us in the majority on the Justice Committee our view was very clearly that the member brought forward this bill with the intention of supporting wine-cellar door operators. We sought some advice from the Clerk's team who indicated that amendments like that would be out of scope so we came to a conclusion that while perhaps it was worthy of consideration of expansion—and members are entitled to put Amendment Papers up as well in the committee stage—it possibly may be a better option for another member's bill. Maybe it's third time lucky for Stuart Smith or Greg O'Connor. I'm sure a bill like that would be well and truly graciously received by committees such as the Governance and Administration Committee.Can I move on to just some of our submitters. As mentioned before we had 72 submissions; 12 of them appeared in person. Quite I think uniquely for a bill the vast majority of submissions were for or were by or on behalf of organisations. Quite often with the submission process you'll get a good fifty-fifty mix of organisations or individuals or if it's a particular issue you might get mostly individuals. But this showed that this was an issue that was important to many operators across the country large and small. And that was from across the board: wineries hospitality alcohol harm reduction advocates and also a couple of district councils the Waitaki District Council and the Rangitīkei District Council. Read into that what you will about members Miles Anderson and Suze Redmayne and what they get up to in their spare time and the councils there.So finally in the brief amount of time that I have left before we might rise to go off and do something else I want to talk about the substantial changes that have been offered by the select committee. The first one goes to that scoping issue and actually is a change to the title of the bill. There was a recommendation to change it from "Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Cellar Door Tasting)" to "Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Winery Cellar Door Tasting)" to reflect the intention of the member in that bill. And I think that's a pretty sensible change to make. Just for a notice I got relatively confused because when I picked up the bill it had the old title on the front of the bill. So I now have learnt that that won't change until it passes its second reading. So all going well later on in a couple of weeks perhaps when we come back we'll be able to get that change through.We've heard about some of the definitions around "winery" and about defining a winery as a person whose business includes producing and selling grape wine products or having had them produced on their behalf. There were some concerns that that definition would be overly inclusive and could incorporate or unintentionally capture bottle store operators and supermarkets. So the committee had resolved to change the definition of a "winery" and in fact provide for a specific definition of "winery cellar door" so to limit the ability for bottle stores and supermarkets to try and take advantage of this law change. But as mentioned previously I suspect it's very unlikely to happen.Some of those changes being proposed about kilometre radius restrictions just get us into a situation where we become overly prescriptive as legislators. I think that's a good change because it solves some of those problems that some of the small operators brought to us which was that they don't necessarily have their wine cellar door on the same property where they produce their wine—it may be in a different vineyard or it may be 3 kilometres or 4 kilometres down the road. So this helps put them on a level playing field the same as everyone else.I wanted to talk about the sample-size issue and Jamie Arbuckle covered it pretty well. There was an original recommendation from officials to reduce the sample size down to about 30 millilitres but we as a committee took that to basically incorporate no margin of error really. If you have a strict 30 millilitre pour once you're a millilitre over you're strictly in breach of the Act. We don't want to be trapping people or getting them in unintended trouble. So we thought 35 millilitres was a pretty good compromise. It gives you that teaspoon of margin of error as Todd Stephenson helpfully referred to.In the last few amendments around the provision of snack food there was a question there where we asked the officials to go back for some advice. While we were happy to consider and accept that provision as being part of minimising the harm from alcohol and improving host responsibility obligations there were some concerns that this might put an imposition of cost on the operators who don't already provide food. So officials went away and did some good looking around for us and came back and informed us that that in their view would be a cost of about $300 to $600 every two to three years. We thought that was a pretty reasonable cost for the benefit that this might open up for these operators so we were happy to accept that recommendation too.Look I think that's bordering on enough from us for tonight. I look forward to the remaining contributions in this debate. It may well be the first time that the class of 2023 needs to see a personal vote in a couple of weeks so I'm very much looking forward to that. But I congratulate the member Stuart Smith and I look forward to its passage through to the committee stage third reading and into law forthwith. Thank you.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Members the time has come for me to leave the Chair. The House is adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow.Debate interrupted.The House adjourned at 9.57 p.m."