Browning Steffan; Carter DavidSTEFFAN BROWNING (Green): Kia ora tātou katoa. As I farewell this place I again give my acknowledgment to this House those who have gone before the tangata whenua of this region and indeed Aotearoa.I acknowledge my parents—both no longer with us; Ivan passing away in 2006 and Alice unfortunately just a week and a day before the election that brought me here. I would have liked them to be with me during this phase and my late half-brother Trevor also. And a very fond memory to my beautiful friends who have passed away—too many from cancer; part of my theme today.Mr Speaker I wish to acknowledge you and your work in your role and my cross-party colleagues especially those whom I worked with on the Primary Production Committee. I especially want to acknowledge my son Jordan who has travelled from Melbourne for today as did his brother Jamie for my maiden speech in 2012. I love you both and I am looking forward to spending more time with you and your wives Leah and Dannielle my grandchildren Seneca and Ada and those to come.I am humbled by those people who have come today: my partner Birte my whānau friends and colleagues and experts and acquaintances from the sectors and campaigns during my two terms here including Meredith. Thanks for keeping a sharp shirt on my back when I tired too often of ironing at 1.30 in the morning.Thanks also to those who could not be here but have been such a supportive part of my parliamentary time: Holly Brendan Marion Philippa Susie Meriel Hana Deborah Kyra the Van Pallandts Bob Jen Kerry Tim Ally Ali and Nozz Franzi James Mark and of course Damien at the Grovetown Pub. Pam Nichols your huge help during previous campaigns is of particular note. Thank you all. Thanks to those whom I have stuffed up on and missed out. I love you all.My fellow Green MPs I acknowledge you all: our fantastic predecessors and my colleagues now deeply engaged elsewhere Holly Walker Kevin Hague and Russel Norman. Wow we have collectively done some good stuff. We have a huge amount to be proud of often at huge personal cost. I acknowledge the passion the skills that drive you all.To the great Green team in the party the great staff and the great volunteer crew reaching out to other New Zealanders particularly in this very difficult election phase inspiring hope for a great future together you are putting so much in. That work is so important and I admire you hugely.Of super significance here have been my executive assistants starting with Angela McLeod Dianne Parker Tara Forde Frances Mountier Julian Borman Tim Onnes and to finish Tracey Gallagher and most of you are in the gallery today. You have all gone on to great things. To the other Greens parliamentary staff in Bowen House your skills support and commitment to change are hugely valued. I look forward to some celebration with you later.I acknowledge the parliamentary support staff the cleaners the feeders the library the messengers HR security the receptionists ICT the travel office staff the Chamber staff and those I have omitted unfairly. You are fantastic and I really do appreciate you and your collective work to keep this place functioning well. I saw some of you cleaners and security in the middle of the night all too often—a work habit that I have not quite overcome. The Greens will continue to try to get fair pay for your important but all too often undervalued work.To my leaders Metiria James and Russel before—well we have had our moments as could be expected with my just slightly anarchic and just somewhat passionate expression of my interests and world view. I admire you all for what you have been passionately committed to and what you passionately strive for.Metiria I want to acknowledge your personal sacrifice as you have recently been so harshly judged for what is real life real survival real whānau care and effectively youthful real-time decisions. You have been hammered by the media and those who just do not know what it was like—what it is like. For those in poverty those who are learning who are striving or those who cannot but from places of difficulty often intergenerational that is hard and it further aggravates the injustices that we here all know should be behind us. Metiria I understand you all the more. Metiria you have been courageous. You have given a lifeline of hope to those who need it the most. We can reverse the growing income and wealth gap in Aotearoa New Zealand and eliminate poverty and the harm that flows from it. Thank you Metiria James and my colleagues who are committed to these changes.And then there were my moments of notoriety—it is coming—moments of parliamentary time that felt so hard and so unfair. The most striking encounter with the doubters the risk-averse or overly confident consumers of very narrow interpretations of science or just plain industry-fed scientific propaganda was when I curiously put homeopathy and Ebola together. Wow didn't the sky fall for Steffan Browning!What I was not able to articulate at the time was my love of science and my openness to the advances of science in time possibly being more able to measure and explain and accept the mechanisms that may be at play with homeopathy—see I have not learnt. I note the acceptance and widespread use of homeopathy in Europe including some State support of homeopathics and by British royalty. I cannot pretend not to have seen significant effect in a non-placebo situation with one of my own children. I cannot pretend not to be aware of Brazil and Cuba's use of homeopathic nosodes for effective use in some epidemic situations. Check it out.There are many whom I respect but who may not share my view or experience. However science is a wondrous discipline. We should be hesitant in our discounting of longstanding practices that do give safe benefit although are less understood. I give my respect to the gallery and media beyond when the issues are well researched and the community is accurately informed. Our Government agencies are struggling with the ability to select and use the independent science and treat with appropriate caution that of the agrichemical industries. So there is another side to it.Cancer increasingly eats through our communities from the very youngest to everyone. Our health Minister is being laughed at by cancer charity bosses because he wants New Zealanders to believe we have got a health system that is the envy of the world. But the Minister is not on his own. Some of us are not laughing but crying sobbing because of the unnecessary rise in cancer perpetuated by other ministries that are doing everything to continue and increase the use of a probable carcinogen through the streets and parks and food of New Zealanders. Chemical cowboy country. The machinery of government is broken. There is no pesticide reduction strategy. Successive Governments have allowed the Ministry for the Environment the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) and the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to run amok with numerous new pesticide registrations and very few withdrawals.All of you but the Māori Party and the Greens voted for an extension of data protection to new pesticide applications from 5 to 10 years keeping those who care in the dark about those toxic formulations. Minister Smith will not tell us which of the 75 percent of the over 90 probable carcinogenic glyphosate herbicides have the adjuvant polyethoxylated tallow amine in them which magnifies the toxicity inherent in glyphosate hundreds and even thousands of times and is now banned in Europe. We cannot find out. Chemical cowboy country. Our Ministry of Health relies on the EPA for guidance on carcinogenic substances yet the EPA and MPI are sucked into the vortex of an echo chamber of agrichemical industry science acceptance and speak. Our communities are awash in cancers but our EPA chose to dismiss the finding of its own authority the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—the world's gold standard in carcinogen classification—when IARC found that the EPA's friend Monsanto's product glyphosate was a probable carcinogen.My proudest parliamentary achievement was this 183-page critique of the EPA's review of the seemingly inconvenient IARC finding. I question why the New Zealand Government ignored the advice of the IARC's 17 international expert scientists and used a retired New Zealand toxicologist who had previously underplayed the risks of cancer from the now banned DDT and endosulfan pesticides. Why? Chemical cowboy country.I want to acknowledge the huge part played by my very dear friend Jodie Bruning in writing and researching my critique—Jodie Bruning of Ritedemands.org.nz; that is spelt R-I-T-E demands.org.nz—and those many scientists who support what we did. Some are here today.We point out that the New Zealand EPA does not consider the full formulation of these Roundup-type herbicides as actually used. Our critique outlines how the other overseas agencies that our EPA chooses to align with—such as the US Environmental Protection Agency the European Food Safety Authority and the Joint Meeting on Pesticide Residues (JMPR)—also selectively use unpublished industry selected and supplied science such as Monsanto's. Our EPA is wrong when it accepts JMPR advice when its glyphosate working group was chaired by two men with serious conflicts of interest as part of International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) primarily funded by chemical companies including Monsanto but our EPA listens to that. ILSI specialises in designing industry-friendly risk assessment methods for incorporation into regulations worldwide. No wonder we have problems.And it gets messy here in Aotearoa New Zealand too. The once chief executive and managing director of PGG Wrightson described as an outspoken advocate of genetic engineering and all over Monsanto got PGG Wrightson involved with the GE grasses and also GE trees. He now heads our EPA which is the very agency that will decide on releasing GE trees and grasses—the two crops along with the William Rolleston - linked GE animals dominating New Zealand's GE research and promotion activity. William Rolleston in science funding at the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and Allan Freeth the chief executive of the Environmental Protection Agency make the independence of science and regulatory control absolutely questionable. That chief executive chose not to accept the world's gold standard in cancer classification by doing a sham review that is probably illegal in New Zealand law. It is like the Wild West with Monsanto advocates at the helm and cancers are running amok. Chemical cowboy country.Auckland Council—note Mayor Phil Goff—used the EPA as an excuse to introduce the probable carcinogen-based herbicide into new areas where 1 million people reside 1 million people of your city just to save dollars. And you knew better. But what is the real cost when our friends are getting cancer at younger and younger ages? What is the cost of neurotoxicity and endocrine disruption? Possibly the biggest epidemic facing our country is the fallout of pesticide use—cancer through to antibiotic resistance—yet Governments are letting the Monsantos make the calls.I could have easily done another huge speech about the huge work I have done on biosecurity: oysters myrtle rust Theileria great white butterfly velvetleaf fruit fly and kauri dieback disease. I have been deeply through each of those generally pre-empting the MPI's ponderous approach. I predict that myrtle rust—and I am very sad about this—and kauri dieback will be defining issues for the future New Zealand landscape.I negotiated the foreign charter vessels legislation as the last bill of the last Parliament to speed fishers out of slave-like conditions sooner. I negotiated to remove the excesses of the Food Bill and got genetically modified foods included as a possible food safety issue. I continue to expose the lack of enforcement of GM food labelling regulations since 2003.I have worked for the artisan food producers who are increasingly put out of business because of ridiculously high MPI demands and compliance costs. That same MPI paranoia meant that most raw milk producers stopped their businesses from selling their nutritious milk to the public. I grappled with the complexities of the Fonterra executive's attempt to get Fonterra exposed on the stock market. The same executive stymied my attempts to keep the Kaikōura cheese factory open and transition to a more sustainable and very best value organic production. I have supported efforts trying to set an organic standard in regulation. I have hosted the release at Parliament of the New Zealand Organic Market Report 2012 and the launch of the United Nations International Year of Family Farming in 2014. My bees campaign resulted in thousands asking the EPA for a reassessment of bee-killing neonicotinoid insecticides used unnecessarily on most commercial seed. Chemical cowboy country. The rapidly expanding honey industry needs you all to make some hive-density regulation to quickly curb the spread of both disease and crime.At about 8 p.m. on 13 November last year I made a Facebook post: Sorry to see the world's biggest seismic blasting ship the Amazon Warrior off my beach Rarangi in Cloudy Bay tonight. Hiding from Wellington's protestors today this ship has been allowed in by energy and resources Minister Simon Bridges as part of National's deep-sea oil gamble. Spoiling our super moon viewing this ecological thumper needs moving on out of New Zealand's EEZ." That is what I said Simon. I have never had so many Facebook shares—2037—following the incredible earthquakes that night—Mr SPEAKER: The member has 2 minutes to complete his speech.STEFFAN BROWNING: —as that ship headed out on its dirty mission. Good on you Russel Norman for chasing it and getting into the water in front of it just as I did earlier this year in front of the clam boat that MPI has now allowed to thrash the seabed off that same beach. We are not going to stop fighting the unsustainable practices of the National Government.I have consistently tried to get the National front bench to more humanely assist the quake victims of North Canterbury Kaikōura and Marlborough. I worked with Tina McIvor against a second carcinogenic neurotoxic and ozone-depleting methyl bromide fumigation operation at Port Tauranga right through to winning in the Environment Court. Now the focus is on the current sloppy fumigation practices there. Chemical cowboy country. This is another EPA disaster following its sham reassessment of methyl bromide for increasing log fumigations. The chair of that panel was 6 years later the methyl bromide fumigators' lawyer I faced off with. Chemical cowgirl country.Cutting right across—what a great Green moment when my country of origin labelling of food bill was pulled from the ballot. Sue Kedgley's petition of 30000 had championed COOL—country of origin of food labelling—years before. The vote at first reading was 120 for and just one mean-spirited ACT vote against. Meaningful support really could have had COOL passed before Parliament rises next week. However this Government has stymied the progress of this great Green bill. We hope for better in the next Parliament. What is my future? I have not been searching for my next life phase but the issues that brought me to Parliament are unlikely to be—Mr SPEAKER: Order! I am sorry to interrupt the member but the member's time has expired.STEFFAN BROWNING: Kia ora my friends and colleagues. Thank you Mr Speaker.WaiataMr SPEAKER: I understand that the family of the Hon Annette King is now coming into the gallery so if those supporters who have supported the last speaker could move from the gallery I would much appreciate that. [Interruption] Honourable members the family has assembled. I call on the Hon Annette King to make her valedictory statement."