Hipkins Chris: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 26 November 2014. Volume:702;Page:912. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I am happy to take a brief call on the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill and can I start by acknowledging the many very dedicated and passionate people around New Zealand who are interested in this issue. Like every member of Parliament I get their hundreds if not thousands of emails declaring that they care about animals and I want to send to them a very clear message: I care about animals as well. I have acknowledged all those emails I share the concerns that people have raised and I admire their passion dedication and commitment in doing so over a significant period of time. New Zealand cannot be complacent when it comes to animal welfare.When we look at our “100% Pure New Zealand” brand which our export industries tourism and so many other New Zealand companies rely upon would some of our current practices when it comes to animal welfare stack up favourably against that brand which we are so proud of overseas as being 100 percent pure? The answer to that at the moment must surely be no. Therefore extending the changes in this bill—and in fact I think going further—is very important to New Zealand and I think it is long overdue.I get a bit frustrated. I am a consumer. I look at many of these things from a consumer’s perspective and I get frustrated that the progress on these issues seems to be so incredibly slow. Kevin Hague mentioned Sue Kedgley raising these issues in the House quite some time ago and yet progress has been very very slow.I want to acknowledge people like Mike King for the work that he has done in exposing some of the worst practices in New Zealand. I think many New Zealanders would not have even been aware that those things were happening in a country like New Zealand and it took someone like him to actually shine some light on that before New Zealanders were aware of those issues.Many New Zealanders will look at this from the perspective of being a consumer. I want to pick up a concern that Richard Prosser raised and that is the impact of animal welfare measures on the potential prices that consumers pay for products—you know for food and so on. But the point that I would make is that I remember that it would not be that long ago when going and doing supermarket shopping—probably within the last 10 years—that free-range eggs were maybe two three or four times the price or significantly more expensive than eggs that came from battery hens and yet now in the supermarket the price differential is nowhere near that. The consumer has basically placed the demand on for free-range products. They want to know that their eggs are coming from free-range chickens and as a result the price has actually come down. So to say that looking after animal welfare will come at a cost to the consumer—it does not necessarily apply. Actually in many cases market forces will help to take care of that.Consumers actually want to know that the food that they are buying has been produced in an ethical manner. I want to know when I go to the supermarket that I am buying free-range eggs and I always make an effort to hunt them out. I want to know that the pork that I am buying is ethically produced and that all of the other products that I am buying are ethically produced as well. So I think that the New Zealand consuming public from a consumer perspective want to know those things and I think that New Zealand has been too slow in making sure that our laws have kept up with that and that our regulations have kept up with that. So I welcome the moves in this bill to start to move it further forward and I would like to say that I would like to see much much faster progress than we are seeing.I want to briefly commend a couple of the Supplementary Order Papers that have been put forward on this bill. I want to commend Supplementary Order Paper 341 which bans animal testing for the purposes of meeting the thresholds required for the sale of psychoactive substances. Of course according to the Standing Orders I am not allowed to mention the member who promoted that particular amendment but I do want to say that I think that is a very important amendment. I think that if the only way to prove that a psychoactive substance is suitable for human consumption is to torture animals then I think that we should take the decision as a Parliament that we will simply say that that is not acceptable and that we would rather not have those products on the market. If torturing dogs is the only way to prove that those products are safe—and actually the SPCA would argue that there are other ways to test the products without testing them on animals—then I do not think we should be doing it. I think that if those drug pedlars cannot find another way to test their products those products simply should not be on the shelves and should not be available.I think that similar things apply to cosmetics. We have to look at what is happening around the world. Other countries that we compare ourselves to have taken very principled positions when it comes to animal testing for cosmetics. Not only are they banning the testing but they are banning the importation of products that have been tested in other countries and New Zealand should be looking at that as well. These are our trading partners. These are people whom we have relationships with. If they are doing it then we need to be looking at doing that as well. We should live up to our “100% Pure New Zealand” image the brand that we are so proud of and animal welfare is an integral part of that.