Donnelly Brian: New Organisms and Other Matters Bill — In Committee 
Donnelly Brian: New Organisms and Other Matters Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:612;Page:8931] 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 Just referring to the comments of the previous speaker about the call-in powers and the criteria I say that New Zealand First certainly has an amendment ready. It does not go the full way of National’s amendment but we will be voting for National’s amendment and then there will be a back-up. If National loses the vote on its amendment that party can back ours. These provisions are a nonsense. I think I mentioned Druidism and that is basically what we are talking about here. That makes a mockery of this particular law. 
Part 1 of the bill is the guts of it and it has so many different quite critical parts that need to be discussed and debated here as we go through the Committee stage. I want to focus upon one area that is so important to New Zealand First. I would like members to remember that it was New Zealand First votes that ensured that the moratorium went on in the first place. It was not the Green votes. If members recall the Greens walked out and did not vote. New Zealand First voted to put on the moratorium because we believed there was some critical work to be done. We believed that the royal commission had implied that certain other things needed to be done before New Zealand started to progress any commercial applications. We said that come the time when the moratorium would cease to exist we would reassess the situation to see whether the Government had got its work in place. 
In some respects we are satisfied to a degree with the element of conditional release. We believe that that is a step forward in risk management—very much a step forward. Therefore we would be very supportive of this. However throughout all the submissions and throughout this whole process we have been looking very carefully at the evidence to ask ourselves whether the Government has got itself ready at this time to be able to do all the risk management around this new technology. We largely believe that it has got itself there except that what has come through very clearly is that once we start getting higher up the human food chain there is more and more economic risk. It is not that any real risk to health has been demonstrated but there is a risk in terms of consumers’ perceptions and consumers’ perceptions obviously make a difference when it comes to their decision making. 
I want to make the point that Ashraf Choudhary had one question that he continued to ask everybody. He asked whether there is any evidence that GE is doing any harm to human health. Every one of the submitters he asked said there was no evidence that he or she could put on the table. The Greens would argue that that is because the research has not been done. But we have to take as a reality that there is no empirical evidence or even theoretical evidence that there is harm. However what we do know from research is that there are fears within certain parts of our export markets that GE could possibly do harm and that we do not know all about it. 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: Fearmongers. 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY 
: There are all sorts of fearmongers out there. We know that the most sensitive markets to this are Europe and also Japan and some of the modelling that has been done certainly shows there are some real concerns in terms of whether we proceed down the path of commercial release of anything higher up the human food chain. 
The Government will argue that it does not really matter because in the next 2 years it is highly unlikely there will be any applications; certainly it will be at least 5 years before any ryegrass applications. So we are talking about quite some time into the future before any applications for commercial release of anything close to the human food chain happen. New Zealand First therefore argues why we are risking the image of New Zealand by saying we can go ahead with foodstuffs. We have no objection to our going ahead in some of the other fields. One of the things we picked up in Australia was that Ingard cotton has obviously not had any implications in terms of Australia’s exports of non-GE foodstuffs. So consumers are able to separate those things out but certainly they do have fears. 
One of the questions we asked of the Environmental Risk Management Authority—and even the Minister today could not tell us for sure whether the authority will have its methodology in place by the time the moratorium is lifted—is whether it can do an adequate risk-assessment of the impact on the New Zealand economy of an approval of release of a GE food into New Zealand. In looking at the model that is used we would say that yes it could probably give an assessment of what effect the release of GE-modified onions here would have on the export of onions. What the model does not show is what the impact would be on dairy products.