Guy NathanHon NATHAN GUY (National—Ōtaki): Mr Assistant Speaker thanks for the call. It's interesting hearing the Minister of Agriculture's address this afternoon and I appreciate the sentiments around M. bovis and doing what the Government and industry can to support those farming families through.This bill goes a lot wider than M. bovis. I've spent a lot of time with my colleagues over the last sort of week or so looking at this bill and we realise on this side of the House that the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) system has been tested as a result of the M. bovis response. I want to thank the Minister from the outset for phoning me and letting me know that this bill was coming. Unfortunately he couldn't answer all of the detail but he did allow us to have two meetings with his officials. We still have some unanswered questions that we want to indeed explore through the select committee process.We don't support the House being put into urgency this evening. We feel that this bill—while we could certainly discuss and debate and argue the intent of it—warranted going to a select committee. Indeed I reached out to the Minister and said through the Primary Production Committee we would be prepared to have a truncated select committee process. Indeed I think in the space over the recess that is coming up in the next fortnight we could have turned this bill around and back into the House.The reason that I believe it should have gone to a select committee—and in essence we're cautiously going to support this bill but we need to have some comfort from the Minister through these stages and from his officials when we get into the committee stage. There are four aspects of it and in general you could argue and discuss that on merit three of the four aspects are important and needed. But we have concerns about one particular aspect. I'll come on to that in a moment.The aspect of a search warrant and the particular form" and then changing the clause to "if any" under the Search and Surveillance Act 2012—yep we can discuss and debate that. The one that we have particular concern about is expanding the warrantless inspections of these NAIT officers. It'd be worthwhile for the Minister to explain when he gets into the chair in the committee stage with his officials—he's mentioned twice in his introductory remarks about not increasing the powers of officers. We on this side of the House don't necessarily agree with that.Also this change in this bill will mean that a warrantless inspection can occur. Currently things like copying documents and taking photos and videos can't occur. So the proposal in this bill is indeed to go further than that. I was just talking to David Carter earlier on—who has a huge amount of experience in the House and indeed was a former Minister of Agriculture. What would scare the heebie-jeebies out of farmers is when the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) or Biosecurity New Zealand—because they'll probably have a new sticker on a vehicle; it'll be the same vehicle but a new sticker—arrive and it could be several of them to have a look at animal welfare. In a lot of these cases these officials are indeed multi-warranted. Questions will start coming from the officials and there will be further answers and no doubt more questions and discussions.It's likely farmers being the way that they are that they will say "Come up to"—it might be that they'll go to the woolshed because it's closer or the cowshed and have a discussion. But there's a probability that they may get invited into the house. So we want assurance from the Minister that these warrantless inspection powers that are going to be expanded—will it go as far as the dwelling? We understand how farms work: NAIT records are unlikely to be stored in the computer in the cowshed; they're more likely to be stored in the house. So what does it mean when a farmer with their goodwill nature has invited these NAIT officers into their home? Does it therefore mean that while they're in the home they can start asking for these particular documents to copy them? So we want to understand more about that provision in particular because we have got some grave concerns about that.It also goes on to clarify that NAIT needs to have registered locations because there is obviously a gap in the legislation whereby when a farmer sells to another farmer they need to ensure that that farm is indeed NAIT-registered. That makes logical sense. The next part of this bill goes on to say that there are offence provisions for failure to declare these animal movements.What's also really interesting is that I kicked off the NAIT review in 2016 because I was hearing the concerns from farmers and from NAIT officials whether it's loss of eartags the glitches in the NAIT system or non-compliance—all of those things. Now the report has come back. There are 38 recommendations. We heard from the Minister this evening that 15 of those are going to be dealt with by the Government and another 23 by NAIT and Operational Solutions for Primary Industries. When I look through those NAIT recommendations I can't see anywhere these search and surveillance powers. I struggle to reconcile in the information that I've been given how this is a drafting anomaly between the NAIT Act 2012 and the Search and Surveillance Act 2012. I reckon what's happened—because I've heard this quite a bit around New Zealand—is that NAIT officers MPI officers have gone in to do a warrantless search and they've realised that they can't go as far as where they want to go.So this has not come about through the 38 recommendations of the NAIT review. This is late. This has only come to the table late. We need to understand and hear from the Minister—preferably in the second reading when he next speaks—what are the examples that he can give us so we can understand why there is suddenly this urgency.What's also important to understand is we heard from the Minister just a few moments ago that he's going to have another bill—hopefully not in urgency because we wouldn't appreciate that but he's going to do another NAIT law change in this House. So why wouldn't you do both of those together? Why wouldn't you send them all to a select committee? Why wouldn't you allow Federated Farmers Dairy New Zealand Beef and Lamb New Zealand and farmers that may have been on the other end and had some experience of these warrantless inspections. Why wouldn't you allow them to come and submit?I've been in this House for 13 years and I've heard the Greens talk a huge amount about civil liberties under the Search and Surveillance Act. Surely this warrants going to a select committee even if it was a truncated period.So this is not the end of the debate on this bill. What we have just learnt this evening is there will be another bill. There's going to be another NAIT bill that's going to change the law. Surely it would make sense to have both of these come to the House and send them off to a select committee—not debate them in urgency—so that we can get some comfort and support them in their entirety. I think there are a lot of unanswered questions that we need further debate on."