Goodhew Jo: Address in ReplyText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoodhew Jo: Address in Reply[Sitting date: 29 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:401. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon JO GOODHEW (Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector):I would like to begin by congratulating you Mr Deputy Speaker on your appointment to the role—my fellow classmate of 2005. I am delighted to see you there and I just have every confidence in the way you will take on this position. I would also like to acknowledge as I start my first address to this 51st Parliament the Rt Hon David Speak—Speaker not “Squeaker”—the Rt Hon David Carter and also his Assistant Speakers the Hon Trevor Mallard and Lindsay Tisch.It is great to be starting again. It is great to be through what was a very challenging election campaign. The election campaign was not about the contest of policies or ideas and not even about the contest of ideals for New Zealand. It was about the contest of distraction the contest of sideshow and the contest of theatre and I have to say that I doubt very much that any members of this House enjoyed the fact that we were not debating our policies. I can certainly speak for myself and say that I am pleased that that is behind us. I am pleased that we can get on with the work now and get on with delivering on the policies here on National’s side of the House that we campaigned on.Under the Rt Hon John Key we got a result that I believe we deserved because New Zealanders worked out that they could trust us to deliver on our promises. I believe that New Zealanders knew they could trust us to actually be about all New Zealanders—to deliver to them to work for local communities and to work to make a better life for all New Zealanders—and knew that we would continue to focus on high-quality State sector services reduce costs for New Zealanders grow the economy and protect our environment knowing that all of these are integrally linked to each other.I want to acknowledge the new MPs who have risen in this House and made their maiden statements. I want to welcome them to this place as someone who has been here for some 9 years. I recently reread my maiden statement to see whether I still felt it was valid and discovered I quite liked it again. It is so relevant to the portfolio responsibilities that I find myself with. I will get on to those in a moment.I want to take this opportunity to thank the people of Rangitata—the some 23000 people who said they wanted me to be their MP again. I want to thank them for the honour and the privilege of that. I want to thank the 20100 people who voted for the National Party—unprecedented support for the National Party in my electorate; never has it been so good—and I want to thank them for the confidence. In my electorate with a long weekend—the election weekend—people voted early in their droves. Partly that was because they were thoroughly heartily sick to death of the campaign. The 33 percent of those who voted in my electorate voted early and many of them told me that they then went and turned off the TV and did not read the paper because they had had enough. I quite understand that. As I said it was a difficult campaign for all candidates from all sides of the House.My portfolios in this new Parliament—and I am absolutely privileged to again be a Minister in the National Government—include the portfolios that I had before of the community and voluntary sector which is one I am enormously proud of. It is such an integral part of New Zealand it is such a generous part of New Zealand and it is such a part that knits together community resilience during the good times and also during the bad. I have also continued with my role as Associate Minister for Primary Industries and I will continue to be given the delegation of responsibility for forestry. It is a sector that I have come to respect and come to know much better than when I took on this role and it is also a sector that has great promise for New Zealand having its highest exports ever in this last year. But it is indeed a sector where New Zealand can see growth. It can see growth in engineered timber products it can see growth in technology being put to greater effect and we can also see that in that sector we could do so much better when we continue to invest in improving skills and training.In terms of new portfolios well I have the food safety portfolio—something that is absolutely integral to our ability to feed so many millions of mouths. I understand that about 35 million mouths is our potential and as a nation we certainly are moving more and more towards that. So food safety is incredibly important. I will go on to some details about that in a moment.Lastly there is my role as Associate Minister for Social Development which will bring into play many of the skills and the knowledge that I learnt and much of the experience that I had as Associate Minister of Health given that we are often dealing with groups that are catering to the needs of New Zealanders side by side. So I am certainly looking forward to that. What I can see is that with my primary industries role community and voluntary sector role food safety role and social development role and coming from a rural electorate these are so important in my electorate as they are in many other electorates in the country.In terms of the primary industries sector we are certainly reaching for the stars but in reaching for the stars it is incredibly important that we do so in such a valid way and in such a careful way that we do not harm the environment at the same time. The National Government has a proud record of keeping in mind the environment but doing more as well. So although we have provided $120 million towards irrigation and water storage we are also setting rules that must be abided by in terms of protecting waterways and improving the quality of water across New Zealand. This is extremely important in my electorate of Rangitata where Canterbury has such an incredible water resource but it is a water resource that is in some cases stretched and a water resource that in many cases does need to be improved.We are putting in place the right business environment so that the businesses of New Zealand can grow. Although the previous member Meka Whaitiri told us that in her electorate she does not see enough jobs what I can say for my electorate is that we are starting to see skill shortages because there are so many jobs going that our businesses just want to grow grow grow. Right now we as a Government need to make our best efforts to make sure that the skills are in place so that IT engineering food sector and primary industry sector roles are taken up with more demand through our tertiary institutions and that these are the people who are trained for my electorate and other electorates to continue to produce high-quality food to export to the world and to have our businesses continue to grow.In terms of our focus on the community and voluntary sector the new frontier for us is social enterprise. Social enterprise is not unknown to New Zealanders. There are many social enterprises that are well-known like the Red Cross. But what we are trying to do is build capability across the country so that social enterprise becomes the way of—literally—doing business to assist with social sector challenges across New Zealand. So the Government is currently working with the Ākina Foundation to energise that sector and to provide more resources so that it can grow.In terms of food safety well there is about 14 percent of New Zealand’s working population employed by food businesses. We need to make sure that we have in place the right regulatory environment not an overly red-tape burdened regulatory environment but an environment that assures the rest of the world that we know what we are doing when it comes to food safety and that we know how to handle events when they happen. We do know that the whey protein concentrate event happened. We have the second of the reports coming out before the end of next month and at that stage we will be able to make the rest of the changes that will be necessary so that the rest of the world can have confidence that not only are we world leader in this space but we learn from events that happen as well. It is absolutely vital that we show as a nation we have the courage to look at what happened what went wrong what can be improved and to grow from that as a nation.Food is a major export accounting for just over 52 percent of our total value of New Zealand exports. So with the world population expecting to get to 9 billion we need to grow and continue to grow our ability to add extra value to the world’s food sources. I just want to add as well that we announced today alongside Minister Joyce the establishment of the new Food Safety Science and Research Centre. This will improve traceability of our food products and it will build primary sector capability in emerging markets. Massey University will be the host of this and alongside industry interests this will lead our continuing growth when it comes to food safety.We want to make sure that there is more confidence in New Zealand’s systems as well. As the Associate Minister for Social Development I am looking forward to working with the Minister for Social Development the Hon Anne Tolley. This is a particularly important portfolio for New Zealand. I conclude my comments Mr Assistant Speaker Mallard and I look forward to working with you also.