Tirikatene RinoRINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): I am pleased to speak on the first reading of the Food Safety Law Reform Bill. At the outset I would like to just extend my thoughts as has been expressed earlier to the good people of Havelock North. We know that they will get through this but definitely our thoughts are with them at this time. If we think of the predicament in Havelock North it is not too dissimilar to the subject matter of the bill that we are debating tonight because we are talking about contamination. We are talking about water quality. We are talking about food safety. If we look at Havelock North certainly the questions being asked now are the same questions that were asked when the botulism scare arose. How could this happen? This is not acceptable. Where is the leadership? We need to get to the bottom of this. Questions need to be asked and answered. Obviously our thoughts are with the people of Havelock North at this time and I know that they will get over this but we are talking about 2000 people in a community. This is not an insignificant matter. We do have to draw the analogy between what is happening in Havelock North and this bill here which is rectifying a botch-up. We must not forget that and listening to the speakers from the other side it is almost like they start their speeches at the end of the inquiry—Oh we had this inquiry and made these recommendations and everything's all well and good. We're passing the law now to do the statutory tidy-up and everything's all well and good." But I think we really need to backtrack and look at the whole situation that arose around the botulism scare. We must not downplay it because our whole economy as a country was at risk. We are talking about Fonterra. We are talking about the fourth-largest producer of dairy products in the world—7 percent of our GDP and multibillions in turnover. It is a significant company and it committed a grave error in its processing plant in Hautapu. At that little processing plant they did not clean a pipe as they were supposed to and that paru pipe as we would call it—a contaminated pipe—processed 38 tonnes of whey protein concentrate. That 38 tonnes of concentrate was sold to customers around the world. It was sold around the world mainly to food producers—producers of infant formula sports drinks protein drinks and the like. So that 38 tonnes ended up in 1000 tonnes of all of these other value-added products that were all over the world—all over the globe. The damage that was done through that oversight at that plant could have been remedied straight away had the people responsible at the plant said: "Oh we have a problem here. We haven't quite followed the rules. Let's downgrade this whey concentrate and we will have to market it through some other channels as a downgraded product." But no that product was formulated and sold. This occurred around early 2012 and it was not picked up until about 12 months later in early 2013 when Fonterra was alerted to the testing and the potential for botulism bacteria being present in a sample.We can breathe a sigh of relief and say "Oh well there wasn't botulism so everything's fine. There wasn't a scare." but the fact of the matter is if you read that report—and it's 110 pages long—you will see that it details multilevel failures from Fonterra and the testing agencies through to the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) as well. I guess what I am saying is we do need to look at the seriousness of what this piece of legislation is addressing because what happened then was that Fonterra had it retested and then it found out in about July 2013 that whoa this was serious. Fonterra had to elevate it and that led to MPI doing a worldwide product recall. That is serious serious damage to our dairy industry our brand and Fonterra. That worldwide public recall led to importation bans by our major market in China. What I am saying is that we should not downplay the seriousness of that botulism scare. It is timely that we are now debating this food bill which is implementing the recommendations that were made in that report because as I have mentioned there were a host of blunders failures and errors that occurred right throughout all of the different parties involved. As I was saying Fonterra has been deeply impacted on. I am really surprised that the members on the other side are saying: "You know there wasn't botulism in there so no damage was done." Fonterra and our industry are still dealing with the aftermath of the damage to this day. If we look at the litigation and the damages that are being claimed by Danone it is in the billions of dollars. That is a contingent liability that Fonterra is potentially facing for the damage that 38 tonnes of whey protein caused to Danone's business. That is a huge potential liability that Fonterra still has to face up to. Sure Fonterra owned up to breaches of the Animal Products Act. It copped a fine for not following its own food risk-management procedures and I am pleased to say that in the aftermath of the report it has definitely stepped up its game as it most certainly had to in terms of its crisis management and dealing with a crisis on such a grand scale. So it certainly was a wake-up call. In no way was it a case of "no damage done". Certainly it may not have been botulism that was found in the whey protein concentrate but there was bacteria found in it. So again this goes back to our brand our reputation and the impact that this has had. Confidence was shaken during the botulism scare—just as confidence has been shaken in the community of Havelock North. I do acknowledge MPI for putting through these changes that again will address those risk management issues. At the time we were concerned—and I think this is a fair point—that MPI was a superministry where forestry fish food safety and everything else had been thrown into one super-organisation. To be fair it did not respond very well to this crisis. But the ministry has learnt its lesson and we are seeing the passage of this legislation. This bill will do the legal strengthening of the processes that is required so that we can ensure that we have robust systems so that we can build and be proud of our brand and more importantly so that we can give confidence to our customers in the market. They need to be able to have confidence that we do have the systems in place so that they will not be buying contaminated products—they will not be getting a worldwide recall—and they will have hopefully the confidence to buy many more volumes of our world-class dairy products."