Tirikatene Rino: Food Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTirikatene Rino: Food Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 14 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17845. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]RINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Thank you for the opportunity to speak in this Committee stage of the Food Bill. I believe I may have just nipped ahead of my colleague Mr O’Connor. I will start this off.I am pleased to be speaking in this Committee stage. This is a significant piece of legislation. As we know it has had many years in development going all the way back to when Labour was in Government. It is a very important piece of legislation because we need a modern risk-based food safety regime.As we are on Part 1 I would like to start my contribution right at the very start where clause3(1) says: “This Act replaces the Food Act 1981.” That is a very welcome provision because that is a very outdated piece of legislation—30-plus years old—and it has caused a host of difficulties for many small businesses and territorial authorities right across the country over a long period of time. It is very welcome that we will be putting this bill through so that we can see the repeal of that particular piece of legislation.Just to give you an example there are many small businesses across the country that have been stymied at times by overly bureaucratic territorial authorities that have been trying to fit the archaic piece of legislation the Food Act 1981 to the operations of modern food vendors and modern purveyors of kai of food. To give you an example we have had a host of some really bizarre situations—for instance a cafe owner in Tūrangi Ms Upston’s great electorate. Unfortunately the district council there insisted that with the installation of a new toasted-sandwich maker that cafe had to install a commercial-grade extractor that cost more than $7000—just because the cafe operator wanted to have a toasted-sandwich maker. Fortunately these absolutely really bizarre draconian measures that have been placed on cafe owners are eliminated through the introduction of this legislation.There are other examples such as the kuias the old ladies up in the far north who made strawberry jam and sold it at the local Kerikeri hospice charity shop. Those lovely dear ladies found that they had to produce their jam in a commercial kitchen so they were technically contravening the law. Again these really bizarre outcomes stymied the entrepreneurial spirit and the generosity of these small businesses.There are other examples of territorial authorities really struggling with the one-size-fits-all prescriptive approach of the Food Act 1981 because as we know back in the early 1980s it was far different from what we have today. I think it was simpler. We did have fish and chips and fast food but we did not have things like I guess onlinepurchases of food. The industrial techniques of producing food have really come on in leaps and bounds over that period of time. Therefore the legislation of 1981 is really out of date and it is a very welcome move under this legislation that we will finally say goodbye not only to that Act but also to the prescriptive regulations that were promulgated under that piece of legislation because those regulations added to the complexity and the cost and the bizarre outcomes for small-business owners. What we are getting under this piece of legislation is a much more suitable piece of legislation that fits all types of food businesses from the small coffee cart and the small cottage-industry jam-maker right through to the big industrial processes and indeed exporters.It is a well-thought-through piece of legislation and can I commend all of the officials who have spent many years on this and also especially members of the Primary Production Committee who have given it very close consideration and made some very good improvements especially Supplementary Order Paper 278 from the Minister for Food Safety. Things like the good old Kiwiana sausage sizzle have been given due recognition that they do not need overly bureaucratic sorts of food standards and other compliance measures placed over the top of them. So there are some real common-sense amendments that have been made to get the bill to this Committee stage.But there is one glaring omission in this bill in Part 1. Thankfully my colleague the Hon Damien O’Connor has proposed a very sensible amendment in Supplementary Order Paper 440 that there be country-of-origin labelling included in clause 4. That is very important because we on this side of the Chamber and many other parties here—except for Peter Dunne whom this amendment really rests on—believe that Kiwis have the right to know the origin of the food that they consume and that they purchase. It should be implemented through this Supplementary Order Paper. I encourage the members of this Committee to take the opportunity to make this very sensible improvement to Part 1 so that we do add that element of as Mr O’Connor calls it COOL—to adopt the acronym for country-of-origin labelling. I am not really getting any jokes out of this. We need to adopt the cool. We need some coolness. We need to put some cool into the country-of-origin labelling in clause 4.I would like to go back to my favourite example which is the good old Kiwi sausage the banger and bacon. Very few Kiwis know that the majority of the pork that is consumed in this country actually comes all the way from Canada North America. Should there be country-of-origin labelling I think people will be a bit more thoughtful in terms of the origin of their pork of their food and where it comes from. They do have a right to know. So that is one sensible amendment that I do recommend in my contribution on this first part. Thank you.