Parker David: New Organisms and Other Matters Bill — First Reading 
Parker David: New Organisms and Other Matters Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:608;Page:5340] 
DAVID PARKER (NZ Labour—Otago) 
: 
 I rise to speak in support of the bill. Firstly I thank Mr Donnelly for his contribution. It was a very considered and I thought a wise assessment of the underlying issues. I come from a background of having been involved in a number of biotechnology ventures before I arrived in Parliament. Because of the commercial imperatives and also because of the moratorium none of them involved genetic modification (GM) but quite a few of them came close to that. So my interest in the subject of this debate predates my arrival here and indeed I was a submitter to the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification. 
At the heart of some of the things I submitted on were the process issues which are now covered by this new legislation. The submission that I and quite a few other submitters made was that it is appropriate to have levels of care imposed by the legislation that reflect the level of seriousness of what is being contemplated. So I am pleased to see here that amongst the other things in this bill one of them is the streamlining of the process of approving low-risk genetic modification work within contained laboratories. Under this legislation if it is passed in its present form after going to the select committee the approval that a university for example may have for experiments in a contained laboratory will enable approval of the project rather than approval being required for each organism or each change to an organism as that project takes place. 
One of the reasons it is important not to clutter up the regulatory environment with low-risk things is that it is important that the higher-risk things are accorded the priority they deserve for proper and careful consideration. Under this bill if passed the most detailed and most cautious assessment is reserved for the cases of conditional or unconditional release where the environmental effects are potentially more serious. 
I will give a practical example of why I am pleased to see there is yet another level of consideration that can be given. There is a power introduced to deal with emergency situations and the example I like to use as to why that is appropriate is the case of Great Britain recently with its terrible foot-and-mouth outbreak. One of the choices that Great Britain faced was whether to vaccinate its cattle against foot-and-mouth. The reason that countries are very reluctant to use foot-and-mouth vaccines is that they are live vaccines—a live organism is injected into the animal. When an immunised animal is tested it is difficult to ascertain whether the animal has the foot-and-mouth symptoms as a consequence of immunisation or as a consequence of the wild virus. For that reason Great Britain felt constrained to kill hundreds of thousands of livestock at the cost of great suffering to the animals and also at great environmental cost as it incinerated them. 
There is a good argument to be made that if a genetically modified vaccine was available which would be a live organism that included markers in it to identify it as being a genetically modified organism then if an animal was injected as part of the immunisation process with that genetically modified organism (GMO)—because it would be a GMO—in that live vaccine then upon the animal exhibiting symptoms of food-and-mouth following vaccination it would be possible to ascertain whether it had the live wild form of the virus or had just been vaccinated. I think that simple example of a situation that would or may come to pass if the most terrible of all things happened to our primary production industry—if foot-and-mouth ever became established in New Zealand—serves to illustrate why it is important that we do not have a blanket ban but procedures as proposed by the bill to allow the appropriate level of regulatory control reflecting the level of risk.