Shearer DavidDAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): Labour will be supporting this bill as well and I think pretty much everything that Minister Goldsmith has just spoken on we would very much agree with—wholeheartedly in fact. We are about to commence more formal discussions with the EU about a free-trade agreement. It has been obviously complicated by Britain exiting from the EU. Britain has been traditionally one of the main ways in which we have entered the EU and now it is as we all know going by itself so we have got to work out new ways of being able to get those talks off the ground again and get them moving. As the Minister said legislation has been sitting there since 2006 but we never actually pushed start to get it under way because talks with the EU had stalled. One of the driving forces behind getting this bill into force is the fact that we are now in a different situation and the Government felt it necessary to push this bill along get it through the House and get it enacted to ensure that we get the protections and privileges and ability to get that trade deal ultimately across the line. The EU by the way—just to give the dimensions—is the largest trading bloc in the world and the biggest market in the world with more than 500 million affluent consumers. Currently it is our third-largest market. It is about $19 billion in two-way trade. About $9 billion of that is exports and about $11 billion is imports so it is a significant and important partner with us and it is a partner with which we do not have at the moment a trade agreement. One of the issues of this bill is essentially to designate areas of New Zealand with regard to wine and define them as areas that cannot be replicated in other places. Obviously we have the example of Champagne in France—that is the only place that can produce champagne. Outside of Champagne you produce sparkling wine. Scotch whisky is another example. Just recently the Greek Government won a case that only Greece can make feta cheese; everybody else has to make white cheese. So if you are buying feta cheese you are getting it from Greece. If you are buying white cheese it is from somewhere else unless somebody is claiming falsely that it is feta cheese. What it means for us is that Marlborough sauvignon blanc can be produced only in New Zealand and labelled Marlborough sauvignon blanc and nobody else can do that. Likewise with Otago pinot noir—it can be done only in New Zealand. That has considerable benefits for New Zealand because as the Minister said our wine attracts a very high premium. In fact the premium that it attracts is higher pretty much than any other wine anywhere in the world. In fact when they looked at this at the end of 2014 the New Zealand bottled grape wine was the highest of any import in the United Kingdom. New Zealand wine was about $9.15 a litre and that compared with second-placed France at $7.36 and the Australian wine was a miserable $5.28. We are getting very good prices for our wines so it is very important as well that we are able to protect the value of those by ensuring that nobody else can use the same descriptions that we use. Likewise we are obligated to make sure that 85 percent of the content of that wine will be wine that was produced in those particular places and only 15 percent is allowed to be blended. That also safeguards our product and makes sure that our product is a good one. The Minister mentioned the wine industry. It is now worth $1.6 billion. It has grown 110 percent since 2008. This is an extraordinary success story for New Zealand. It is now I think the sixth-largest export that we have. It is on the way up and by 2020 it is estimated that it will be worth $2 billion to the New Zealand economy. So the sorts of protections that are here are well worth getting into force soon so that no other producer can come in before us and start claiming that their sauvignon blanc is Marlborough sauvignon blanc when in fact the only place that that can be grown and produced is New Zealand. As the Minister also mentioned there was a lot of support for the bill. There were 133 different submissions. There were 130 of them in support from winemakers and people in the wine industry in particular. The three dissenting if you like voices in that 133 actually wanted to go further and make sure that 100 percent of the wine that was produced in that area was from that area and not blended by 15 percent. So there was unanimous support for getting this bill into operation and as the Minister said it is relatively straightforward. The Primary Production Committee did a good job in making a few minor alterations in order that effectively the list or the inventory of the wines that are going to be listed down is slightly easier to comprehend understand and use. Other than that it pretty much with those minor amendments on the 2006 bill effectively puts the 2006 bill into operation and as a result as I say it is a bit of a no-brainer. This is a good piece of legislation that will protect our industry. It will enable us to get into Europe sell our wines in Europe at a high premium and continue to protect our wine industry going into the future. The Labour Party members for those reasons support it wholeheartedly.