Whaitiri MekaMEKA WHAITIRI (Labour—Ikaroa-Rāwhiti): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. I am happy to take a short call on the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill and follow on from my colleague Rino Tirikatene. Labour supports this bill. As he eloquently outlined—and maybe members of the actual select committee the Primary Production Committee can correct us if we are wrong—the aim of the bill is to extend data protection for uses of innovative products and for non-innovative products. I think in the original Act it was 3 years; in this bill we are looking at extending it to 5 years and in some areas 8 years. This is a bill that very clearly is an enabler to our food system in Aotearoa New Zealand. We want to make sure that products that are brought in do not jeopardise our existing food system in this country but also we want to ensure that we are staying competitive particularly with international competitors in the market that we are trying to achieve.Essentially the objective of the bill is to encourage businesses that own trade name products to register new trade name products and to register more uses for existing trade name products. I understand that looking through the report of the select committee and I want to acknowledge the work of the Primary Production Committee. It is one of the few committees where I think it is really clear that you are either a farmer or you are not and you pull up your sleeves and you get on with it. This is another acknowledgment of the work that the select committee did. There were nine submitters and clearly the committee has debated around getting again the balance right of ensuring that you have got good protection around any innovative projects that are coming to the market as well as encouraging competition because you do not want to end up creating a monopoly for any of these producers of these particular products that we are talking about here. So I just wanted to touch briefly on those.The Government set up a working group back in 2008 to review the data-protection regime. Covec an independent economic research group was commissioned to I guess inform Parliament members on making sure that we obviously get the balance right and to examine the effects of the current New Zealand data-protection rules for agricultural compounds on the market. Its findings informed us of the problems as well as the regulatory options. I note that Federated Farmers wanted more narrow data-protection and a short protection period to support competition and low cost but I do believe that the select committee members took that on board and felt that they had the right mix to ensure that the bill allows for competition as well as protecting obviously our food biosecurity in this country.Obviously there are two parts in this bill. Clauses 4 to 7—I see that the committee has worked very hard inserting new clauses 4A and 4B which are around the assessment of the trade name products and provisional registration respectively and of course in clause 6 of Part 1 where we talk about replacing the existing Part 6 which concerns the protection of confidential information about trade name products.I stand in support of this bill and it is good to see our colleague Damien O'Connor our spokesman for primary industries here. I am sure he will make light of this contribution—other than to say that we support it. It is something that is of value to our food production system in Aotearoa New Zealand. We believe that we have got the right balance and we commend this bill to the House. Kia ora.