Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): I would like to acknowledge the mover of this bill and again reiterate that the National Party will be supporting this bill to select committee. I do think it's really prudent to do something around fairness in situations as the mover alluded to before around farmers getting themselves into difficult situations and having to find a way through it. So I'm supportive of this but like the others have actually queried the structure of this bill and look forward to Parliament having a discussion about it.As the Minister just said it's easy to sit in Wellington and you know forget about things that go on out on farms and I know that there's a number of people in this House that don't do that and that is across the House because I've seen already a couple of you last weekend and I'm sure that both of—sorry Mr Assistant Speaker. I'm sorry that the Minister and also the mover when they were out at the dairy awards last week heard a lot from farmers.What really worries me about some of the conversations we've had around this bill was when the mover Mr Patterson talked about speed. He talked about the speed and it seems to be about getting people through these processes and getting things done quickly and getting the reports out. My question is: at the moment while we're talking about M. bovis which is completely dominating the discussions in the industry how do you even introduce mediation financially when there is no certainty? That is the hard thing that I'm trying to get my head around at the moment because when you're dealing with a normal debt situation where perhaps there's been a drought or there's been a flood—or downturns actually have no certainty either because the last downturn went on much longer and went much deeper than we thought it was going to go. We knew it was going to go deep but there was a very very long point in time when we couldn't see the end of the tunnel. So it makes it very very hard to mediate when there's no certainty.With this M. bovis thing it's even more difficult because with the downturn there was always a light at the end of the tunnel. There was always going to be an upturn in prices and people know that they can hold on for a period of time. But the uncertainty that we're working through with M. bovis right at the moment—farmers are very fearful out there. They don't know where it is. They don't know how far it's gone. They don't know how it's got into the country. They don't know what the cause of it is. Some of them know that it's potentially on their farm. Some of them know that it is on their farm and some of them don't know when it's going to come to their farm don't know when it's going to be eradicated. So a lot of the questions we're getting from farmers at the moment are around certainty and asking the Ministry for Primary Industries to give some certainty because I'm sure they would be quite happy to sit down and have some mediation around this process but you have to have a point of starting a negotiation around that sort of stuff.Often as it was talked about before the debt is too high for the productive capacity on the farm and that is what we look at when we look at droughts and floods and those sorts of things in those adverse circumstances. But I worry going forward—and I'm sure we're going to have a lot of discussions around this as we go through the select committee process on this bill—about the glut of farms for sale. I think the point is that it's been a very hard few years but if we can't supply farmers with certainty—and this whole M. bovis thing I'm already hearing people say Look I'm just going to sell up my herd and I'm going to move on because I'm not sure long term. I want to be prudent now and I want to make that decision." We've only got to get a few people starting to do that and we're going to get some real big uncertainty about land prices if we don't get into a situation where we have some certainty around this.So yes I support the concept of the bill as I said before—but not the actual make-up of the bill—but one thing I will call for while I'm making this speech is to call again for the Ministry for Primary Industries to be really prudent and try and be as speedy as they can to give some certainty to farmers so that at least farmers then know what they're dealing with and if they do have to mediate or negotiate or whatever their decision is then they have the facts on the table to be doing this. I know it's a difficult time but some certainty would be really really helpful right now. So thank you Mr Assistant Speaker for the opportunity."