Browning Steffan: Food Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBrowning Steffan: Food Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 14 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17868. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STEFFAN BROWNING (Green): Speaking on Part 4 of the Food Bill this is one of the core points of the bill. There were the tiers of risk. That was an important part of the bill—isolating and working out which food industries would be considered under what level of bureaucracy. But the other point of the bill was to what I would call homogenise the approach of local territorial authorities throughout the country. There are people whom I know—farmers market producers and the like—who will be selling in one part of a district of a region and they will be operating under one local territorial authority one council then the next day or even later the same day they will be wanting to sell the same stuff in another area and yet were being mucked around and had different standards or hoops to jump through as the different councils used the existing Food Act in different ways to interpret it. They had different fees and of course it was crazy that quite often they had to pay multiple fees to do the same thing even though they were only 20 kilometres away.I am aware that in Christchurch a number of the councils have at last come together in a sort of a hub and allowed producers to work to the one level of inspection and fees. In a way this is what this part—this is my interpretation of what this part of the bill is strongly about. That is one of the reasons the Green Party supports that. It is a very common-sense approach to try to have some commonality throughout the country. But what it also means is that we will still have to watch and make sure—and I say we; thatis the community—that we do not get little tsars of food safety inspectors who still try to make life miserable for people from time to time because it still does come down to personalities and people. But the bill is certainly setting up the way to make sure that there is this sort of more homogenous approach. That is good.All the same there is an issue around fees where the fee structures ideally are within a band and it is not meant to be going over the top. The bill allows for the chief executive of the Ministry for Primary Industries to curtail some councils if they are going over the top and to potentially allow other people to do those inspections and everything to keep the costs down. So again we support that part of keeping costs off our producers. I think there possibly does need to be—and maybe it will come through the regulations—a little bit more clarity all the same of what those costs actually would be. As I say we just need to keep those costs down.The search and surveillance part was an area of great concern for a lot of submitters and it still is for a lot of people. As Damien O’Connor was saying before that is through a number of Acts—through all sorts of legislation and regulation. We have these rather strong powers through the Search and Surveillance Act actually that allow strong levels of inspection and basically breaking and entering at times. I have supported the intent of that in different public meetings because if there is something that has gone wrong and if there are people being admitted to hospital after contracting a food-borne illness and if people are becoming seriously ill we want that stopped. We want to be able to follow through and find where that food comes from. We want to also know where it has been distributed to. If that requires breaking down a door because we cannot get hold of somebody I think that is very sensible and practical. Again it will be a matter of how that aspect of the Food Bill or when it comes to it the Search and Surveillance Act is used—that it is not used inappropriately in any way—