Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. I am very pleased to take a call on the New Zealand Horticulture Export Authority Amendment Bill. I do agree with the previous speaker Mr Smith that how we market to the consumer is crucial to growing the value of our horticultural exports. It is also crucial to increasing the return to growers to pack-house operators and to exporters. This bill is a small step towards doing that because it is providing a structure for minimum recognised quality standards and an ability to coordinate marketing through export marketing strategies and export licensing.But if this Government was genuinely interested in helping the horticultural sector more seriously then it would have progressed this bill much more quickly—it has been 5 years in the making. The Horticulture Export Authority even had a diagram in one of its most recent annual reports that showed a snail to highlight the very slow progress with the bill since consultation started in 2010. So it has been significantly delayed when it could have been introduced and dealt with much more quickly.One of the other ways in which the Government has failed to respond to the needs of the horticultural sector is that the Horticulture Export Authority has long called for country-of-origin labelling for fresh fruit and vegetable products because it believes that this would benefit quality production. Yet the National Government has resolutely opposed this and it could have been dealt with in this bill. We do not have mandatory country-of-origin labelling unlike in Australia. In Australia any food product must identify the country of origin of whatever makes up more than 50 percent of the total production cost of the product. Because we do not have it that means that fruit and vegetable products in our local shops do not have to have any identification on them as to where they come from. Certainly some supermarkets have done this voluntarily but it does mean that local producers are put at risk when we have scares as we did in December 2015 when we had a Hepatitis A scare that was traced back to imported berries. Consumers in New Zealand could not choose local berries so that they would know that they were getting safe berries because we did not have country-of-origin labelling so potentially local producers lost out.If we had the same rules as Australia—if there was proper legislation that was wider in scope than this one—that would make life simpler both for food manufacturers and for exports who were sending their products to both markets. Given that New Zealand is quite a small market it would make more sense if the food producers were doing it on that wider scale so they did not have to change their labels just for us. So that is one area where this bill has failed.Another area generally where the Government is failing the horticultural sector is the fact that it has not taken notice of the Horticulture Export Authority as it has highlighted in its most recent annual report that there is an increasing focus on sustainability in markets around the world. We like to think of ourselves as being clean and green. We like to have that as the basis for marketing a lot of our primary produce yet we are failing to keep up with the international interest and commitment in this area.In Ireland for example Origin Green has been established by the Irish Food Board. It was established in 2012 and it is a whole strategy around sustainability for food. It aims to shift Ireland's agrifood business from one that is focused on low-value commodities as we are here in New Zealand to a much greater focus on what consumers want to being a world leader in the market for premium products and to getting a bigger value share from those markets. Origin Green in Ireland is a voluntary national-scale programme. It is coordinated by its food board and it involves around 55000 Irish farms and 95 percent of food and drink producers—each of those has a 5-year sustainability plan. It has got measurable targets for producers to reduce their environmental impacts and also to provide social benefits to local communities and to make their businesses more sustainable. Those sustainability plans are independently audited annually through the board's quality assurance scheme.In Ireland they are focusing on meeting consumer demands for high-quality safe food that is sustainably produced. Ireland is leaving us for dead in terms of its commitment to sustainability. So that is one initiative that the Green Party would potentially look to review and introduce here because we want a much stronger commitment to sustainability across the agricultural sector.In terms of some of the comments made by previous speakers—Mr McKelvie commented on how we want to see more land used for horticulture in New Zealand. We would certainly agree with that but it is not environmental constraints that are preventing that; what it is is the inflated prices for dairy land. Land prices are inflated because dairying is not considering its externalities in terms of water pollution and climate pollution. If agriculture is brought into the emissions trading scheme (ETS) and if dairying had to recognise that it has costs for the environment and it was having to pay for those costs through being part of the ETS then land prices would decline and it would be much more affordable to have much more diverse land uses not just for horticulture but also for things like forestry. So again Green Party policy to bring agriculture into a regime where it accounts for its greenhouse emissions would help horticulture expand because it would help bring our inflated land prices down.This is a small and useful bill but it only takes a very small step in terms of marketing strategies; it does not really tackle the barriers to the horticultural sector expanding. Those include bringing land prices down having a long-term strategy for sustainability in the sector and ensuring that we actually have all food production and fibre production sectors taking their greenhouse gas emissions into account. That is the sort of more innovative and more comprehensive initiative we would get with the Green Party being part of a progressive Government next year.