Guy NathanHon NATHAN GUY (National—Ōtaki): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. I want to acknowledge Gareth Hughes and his contribution in the House this evening. I also want to acknowledge Steffan Browning who brought the bill in and got it past its first reading in—when was that? That was way back in April 2017. For us in the National Government at the time that required quite a bit of soul-searching over whether we wanted to support the bill to the select committee. We did indeed vote for it in April to send it off to the select committee and I remember at the time being briefed by Ian McKelvie who was chair of the Primary Production Committee and who was saying that this bill was pretty much a dog the way it was originally drafted and it needed a lot of resuscitation to get it to where it is today. About 400 people submitted on the original bill and it wasn't until we got the officials in front of the select committee—according to Mr McKelvie—that they realised that this bill was indeed a problem because with the way it was designed it was indeed towards a single Act. So what happened then was the committee decided to effectively gut the bill and that's covered in the bill. It talks about recommending that all provisions in the bill be deleted excluding the title commencement and purpose clauses. Indeed the bill required a huge amount of panel beating but—to give some positivity to the debate this evening—it was important that that did happen. So then it got to the point of effectively being redrafted and put back out for further submissions and we got almost another 400 submissions—386. There were a lot of consumers concerned about it and wanting to know where their food does come from and the focus on the bill that we are debating this evening—and it looks likely that it will pass this evening—is more on the Fair Trading Act. It gives the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs the ability to regulate to set these country-of-origin food regulations exactly under that Act. So the Minister in time could choose to set more food ingredients—single ingredients—through the regulations. At the moment it is very focused on single ingredients that are fresh or frozen or indeed unprocessed or minimally processed—what I mean by that is cut filleted or minced. Like Gareth Hughes I go to the supermarket and do quite a bit of shopping. Normally I get given a list by my wife and I spend a lot of time at the meat part of the supermarket—unlike Gareth Hughes. Yes I heard the comments of New Zealand Pork in the select committee and I understand that potentially there's an advantage for New Zealand pork producers—knowing that a huge amount of our pork comes from overseas countries—so I get the fact that consumers want to know where their food comes from. There's a very important point: this bill is not about food safety; it's about the origin of food and where that particular food comes from around the world. We shouldn't cloud the fact that this bill is not focused on food safety because New Zealand has world-leading food safety standards. They were strengthened when indeed we had the whey protein concentrate issue with Fonterra which was a false alarm. So the food safety Act was strengthened as a result of that and we should be proud of the fact that New Zealand produces premium food products that are exported to around 130 countries around the world. So in summary we support the bill. It took a lot of work for the select committee to get comfort as to producing a bill that was simple and that was practical so that consumers know where their food comes from. The final point that I want to make—and Gareth Hughes touched on it—is we were very focused on the fact that we didn't want this bill to be a non-tariff barrier—in other words a piece of regulation or law that could be used against us in international countries. We interrogated Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade officials the Ministry for Primary Industries and the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment to give us some comfort that the regulations will be drafted in accordance with and that they meet our international obligations. So with those particular comments the National Party supports this bill.