Hughes GarethGARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Madam Chair. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I think the Minister in the chair in his latest of a long line of responses to questions from the floor was overly generous and conciliatory to the Opposition because I don't think our rural communities or farmers are being well served by the debate and quite frankly the politics we've seen dished up in this debate. We've seen exaggeration. We've seen red herrings. We've seen extreme claims: extreme claims of conspiracy theories that officials are running rampant trying to totally change the regime under the catastrophe that is M. bovis—an absolute conspiracy theory; extreme claims that somehow Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) officials are getting greater powers than police officers as Gerry Brownlee said or even more bizarre claims that they're getting even more powers than counter-terrorism operations in New Zealand. Our public and our rural communities aren't served by these exaggerated claims. We should be getting proper information accurate information to people which will be on the parliamentary record.Matt King: Have you read the bill?CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Order! I have read the bill Mr King. I have read the bill.GARETH HUGHES: This is a technical amendment. Even if the Opposition says it a hundred times that it's not it does not make it true. But I have a question—I have a question for the National Party. Given this technical amendment simply aligns the legislation with the existing search and surveillance legislation that they passed—you know with the existing safeguards within it—is National going to now logically follow and amend legislation or put up members' bills to put these extra hurdles these extra jumps that they want to see MPI go through into other legislation? Is National going to introduce legislation to put existing hurdles they want to see in the Wine Act? Are they going to put them in the Waste Minimisation Act? Are they going to put them in the Fisheries Act? They're being absolutely logically inconsistent asking for greater hurdles for MPI. Given it was National that put in the warrantless search provisions for NAIT are they going to now follow the tenor of the debate tonight and remove that in the future? It was National that put in the warrantless search functions. This is why I say the public aren't being well served by the debate and the tenor coming from the Opposition. Look the fact is these warrantless searches were there originally. They follow strict guidelines: the codes within the departments. Now the fact is it's their job right? It's their job and that's why National put it in the original NAIT legislation for compliance officers to actually go talk to people to actually do their job investigating. They have those guidelines they've got to follow. This legislation passing is simply fixing the problem when they exercised their functions did a warrantless search as part of their routine compliance obligations and they could literally see offending material. Let's say—a hypothetical scenario—a whole bunch of counterfeit tags were sitting on a table. National if you follow the logic of their debate tonight would not let that official take a photograph because the fact is they're trying to make up for quite frankly the botched job they originally did with bluster exaggeration and red herring in this debate.Now I've been asked why the Green Party is supporting this under urgency. The Green Party supports urgency when there's a legitimate case for urgency. In this case we are talking about tens of thousands of cows being culled we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars we're talking about a biosecurity crisis which—quite frankly we're fortunate that it wasn't foot-and-mouth because the regime that National created wasn't fit for purpose. This was something the Prime Minister has said has failed abysmally; something Minister O'Connor has said was pathetic—the NAIT enforcement; something we've heard one of the creators Coats saying was a betrayal of New Zealand agriculture. So no amount of bluster no amount of making things up no amount of exaggeration is going to change the fact we're here today to fix to clean up the mess that was created. This technical amendment is doing that because biosecurity is important to New Zealand. It's important to our economy and I just want to make sure the record's straight and farmers and our rural communities know exactly what's happening here.