Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. First up I would like to acknowledge the loss of life that happened with the sinking of Gulf Livestock 1. It's often something that's forgotten in this whole debate. Always often when we speak about this I think about those families that have lost family members. Now while at the front end of this I wouldn't disagree with a lot of the words that the Minister used when he made the speech preceding mine around the highest standards of animal welfare and the opportunities we have to show that to other countries in the world. However when we had the select committee during this process we actually saw some pretty good gold-standard opportunities to do this in this very industry. That I think is what is really disappointing. We saw a range and we actually saw some quite horrific options which we also believe should never have seen the opportunity to be able to export animals. But what I will say is that the industry came along and they supported in good faith the select committee process. We do have a very good Primary Production Committee under the chairmanship of Jo Luxton and I have to say that the committee worked well together but National is very disappointed that nothing that the submitters said during this process was able to change any of the dynamics of the bill as it went forward. While the Minister says that it's only 0.2 percent of our exports and it sounds like a very little matter for New Zealand this matter is a very big matter for those people who are currently in the live export trade business. It's not a little matter to them and it feels a little bit like it's been diminished because it's only a small part of our wonderful opportunity to export and show the world what we do. So I'd like to say we were very disappointed on this side of the House with the result of the select committee—not so much the process because as I say it's a very good committee to work in. I think one of the things that the Minister's missing in this—well there's a few things that the Minister is missing in this actually but one of them was the quote from him saying that it's putting our international reputation in the hands of a small number of people who are trading livestock and in my view was not worth the risk which is why we are proceeding with this legislation." Now time and time again I have asked the Minister what evidence he has brought to bear—and he did mention a couple of conversations that he had throughout the trade deals recently—but I've asked what evidence the Minister based this decision on because what has been shown in the regulatory impact statement was that up to the point of looking at this decision and the sinking of the Gulf Livestock 1 there was very little evidence and there wasn't a whole lot of data from the Ministry for Primary Industries to show the variation in this business to show exactly how good the gold-standard people are or to show quite how bad the others were. It took a tragedy to bring a lot of that to life. I believe that the Ministry for Primary Industries have done a lot of work on that since and that's where it came down to the recommendation of a couple of options: whether it be a ban on the livestock export or whether it be continuing livestock export but with stronger regulatory and non-regulatory interventions—a consolidation of some of the options that were put up originally. We do notice that the Ministry for Primary Industries initially went one way and said "Actually we think that better regulation would be the option that we would be able to take on with this." But it just seems that they did a turn on the way through. Obviously Cabinet made a decision that they wanted the ban to happen. Unfortunately anything that was said about the other option with stronger regulation from that point on wasn't taken into account. So the Minister hasn't really given any evidence as to why this couldn't be improved with a stronger regulatory system. The industry is up for it. They've asked for it. I think the biggest disappointment in all of this is particularly around the timing of it because we've got a challenge in our livestock industries that we need to solve and that is around bobby calves. Bobby calves is one of those—you know to have milk or to have animals we need animals to calve and we have surplus animals and we don't need them all. Unfortunately people do not like to see four-day-old calves going to bobby. So a lot of these calves were actually being grown put on the ships and actually exported for a better life. That came into the debate quite a lot as we went through the select committee process as well because there seemed to be a lot of suspicion about some of the places that we were exporting these animals to. But we also got some very good presentations at great lengths from the other end of the supply chain to show that these animals were being well looked after. I have to scratch my head with anyone having the suggestion that they may not be looked after because these animals were actually worth good money. It might be 0.2 percent of what we trade but actually these animals were worth good money and I can't imagine why anybody at the other end of the supply chain would pay such good money for an animal that they had no intention of looking after. So I just want to mention a couple of quotes here from people during the select committee process. One of them was Mark Willis the chairman of Livestock Export New Zealand who said his organisation had created the so-called gold standard a leading welfare assurance programme that he wanted to see implemented. It's a high-level risk mitigation document. We saw a lot of evidence about putting an extra five days' worth of food supplies on boats in case there was a hold-up. And let's face it most of us saw the conditions that Gulf Livestock 1 sank in and it should never have been in that situation. They're putting extra food on these boats to make sure that if they do get into a situation where they couldn't cross a certain area due to rough seas that they had enough feed for the animals. Mr Willis said that rather than banning exports he called on the Government to create the appropriate regulatory framework to ensure the standard was adhered to. No one's arguing with that because it's extremely important. What he said at the time and from what we've seen in the regulatory impact statement the lack of regulation rather than the export trade has actually been the issue. Another submitter David Lindsay of Gladvale Farms said the ban would be pretty significant as the export market has proved to be a very good important outlet for our unrequired calves which was actually the issue that I just brought up a moment ago. Not only that but profits made from exporting animals have been reinvested back into the business. And according to Lindsay Gladvale's turnover from the export trade is more than a million dollars a year. So for some businesses that is very significant. But I also remember a submission from a person from Northland who talked about the effects of jobs in their local communities. That a lot of employment is actually not just the shipowners but the employment of the people in the local communities was expressed during the time that we went through this select committee process. So we at National see this bill is a kneejerk reaction to a maritime disaster. It was actually a maritime disaster that caused this not the industry's inability to hold up and carry out this trade in a fashion which supports our animal welfare. A survey has been done—and I'm probably going to say this word wrong—but the Voconiq survey was done amongst a wide range of New Zealanders and over 60 percent of the community members preferred to increase the animal welfare standard for live export instead of prohibition. So on this side of the House National are always looking about how we can make improvements and taxing and banning things is not the way to get improvements with either our industries or our country. I think we're better than that. I think that we can actually sit down and work out processes to make things better without feeling like we have to turn around and ban things because a few people say they don't like them. You know there were a lot of form submitters but the ones who came in the room gave us a very good example around how they could do gold standard. We do not support this piece of legislation. Thank you Mr Speaker."