Brownlee Gerry: Wine Bill — Second Reading Procedure In Committee Third Reading 
Brownlee Gerry: Wine Bill — Second Reading Procedure In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:612;Page:9490] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam) 
: 
 I would appreciate the Minister of Agriculture taking a call to explain fully the powers of entry for wine officers. This bill sets up a new category of policeman known as a wine officer—a person who apparently has the opportunity to enter wineries and exercise all the powers given under this section of the Act together with I suppose the direction of scrutiny from some Government department that I am sure will be established to be known as the “Wine Department”. It is not usual for Parliament to grant these sorts of powers to anybody. It is not usual for Parliament to grant to people other than perhaps the police excise officers and those sorts of people the right to enter a property quite freely to undertake some sort of activity in scrutinising what is going on in those premises. 
I understand there is a necessity to protect the industry in this country. However I ask the Minister given the extraordinary depth of capital investment that people have to make to get into the wine industry why they would want to stuff it up—because that is what the bill suggests in giving this sort of power to a wine officer—by doing something dodgy in the production of their wine? I think it is over the top. Even the suggestion that they simply cannot enter a property but have to get a warrant from any District Court judge community magistrate justice of the peace or registrar does not quite do the job. We know that it is easy to go to a justice of the peace. Justices of the peace are unlikely to turn down an officer of the law which these people will be so they will grant them a warrant to go jackbooting through a winery overturning the place and perhaps even by their very visit destroying the reputation of that particular winery’s label. I want the Minister to explain why he thinks it is so important that these wine police are put in place. 
That is one of the aspects of the bill that the National Party has serious reservations about. This is an industry that to some extent survives on the reputation created by not only the winemaker but also the location of the vineyard and ultimately the product that consistently comes out of that vineyard. I suggest to the Minister that an overzealous wine policeman getting a warrant to go ferreting through the activities of a particular winery could very quickly destroy the value of a label. It seems to me that if there were unscrupulous characters in the industry it would be easy for them to go to some gullible wine policeman and say: “I think you had better go and investigate my competition down the road because they are putting X Y and Z in their product.” which is contrary to the consistency issues that the bill itself sets out to protect. By the wine officer undertaking that activity there is some destruction of the label which might have been built up over decades of family activity of struggling to make the particular business entity work and of competing in competitions to get a name and a good reputation. It is very important that this Committee is reassured that the necessity of these wine policemen is well understood and totally in keeping with the intention of this bill. 
There is another aspect in the bill that bothers us a little bit—that is the methods by which costs may be recovered under parts of this bill. A range of fees or charges for all sorts of things are listed in the schedules and one would assume—and the Minister can clear this up—that these fees and charges are not currently an impost upon those who participate in this particular sector.