Ewen-Street Ian: Animal Products (Dairy Products and Other Matters) Bill — Second Reading 
Ewen-Street Ian: Animal Products (Dairy Products and Other Matters) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:624;Page:19010] 
IAN EWEN-STREET (Green) 
: 
 The Greens will support this bill but I personally find myself with a degree of ambivalence about it. My head tells me that bringing dairy products into line with other food products makes sense. My head tells me that reducing risks to consumers from pathogens also makes sense. So my head tells me that supporting this bill makes sense. 
But my ambivalence is due to a sense of loss—a loss of innocence or something. I cannot quite put my finger on it. It marks the passing of the time when food products in New Zealand were safe simply because they were grown in New Zealand. 
 Maybe it is a function of my age. After all I am old enough to remember the “milko” coming to my parents’ home in a horse-drawn cart if one can believe it and ladling the milk from a steel can into a steel billy on our back doorstep. In retrospect of course I know that that whole process was entirely unsanitary and I am certainly not advocating a return to it. 
Milk as somebody said is a bacterial soup that is just waiting to be an expert transmitter of all sorts of infections and diseases. It needs to be pasteurised handled hygienically and kept cold. So bringing all stages of milk production under a risk management programme—from the cow’s teat to the foreign consumer—makes a lot of sense. 
Of course it makes sense but I am still a bit saddened by the process. I still mourn the passing of simpler times when the quality of the product was paramount to the farmer. The idea of extracting maximum productivity from each blade of grass was still years away—even decades away for Mr Carter. Times were when cows grazed on the available pasture and we did not force-feed grass with overdoses of nitrogen superphosphate and other chemicals. Times were when we did not have to transport irrigation water many kilometres in order to grow cows where they did not want to grow naturally. Times were when we did not need to generate more electricity to pump that water or to run the cowsheds. 
These days of course it is the export of milk solids that is the imperative in the dairy industry. That industry is the only primary industry in New Zealand that provides a genuine commodity on the international scene. That commodity is the only thing about which we are genuinely internationally competitive so it must have guaranteed production systems. 
We must always be able to provide a product of the highest quality. We all know that. The production system must be verifiable and accountable and exporters must know what they are getting. Any trace of pathogens or bad husbandry must be traceable back to individual herds and once a herd is identified we can get back to individual cows. 
My head knows those things but my heart still grieves for the small operators whose doors now must always be open to bureaucracy who face large compliance costs in maintaining their risk management programmes and who always have to be aware that somebody will come knocking on their doors wanting to inspect what they are doing. I am sad for the solid Kiwi sharemilker who just wants to get out there and milk cows. Those sharemilkers have always done it well always done it efficiently and always done it in a way that ensures a safe product. 
But the pressure to produce more has almost converted dairy cows into factories. We put in grass at one end and we get milk out at the other end. We put more and more chemicals on to our pasture and we put more and more chemicals into our cows. One thing I think we overlook is that we are tending to specialise in grass species as well. We are putting fewer and fewer grass species in front of the cows so we are making the ecosystem consist of fewer and fewer elements and it becomes less and less robust as we do that. Now of course some people also want to introduce genetic engineering—but let us not go down that road. 
Yes of course we need our risk management programmes. We need to have verifiability; we need to have accountability; we need to have traceability. We need to make sure that our food products are safe. My head says to vote for this bill but I confess that my heart is not in it.