Mackey Moana: Biosecurity and Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Legislation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Mackey Moana: Biosecurity and Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Legislation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:645;Page:14339] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased to stand to take a quick call on the first reading of the Biosecurity and Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Legislation Amendment Bill. Quite a long path has led to this legislation being here in this House. Again it reminds us that a careful balance is required when we are dealing with biosecurity. 
Although on the one hand I think everyone in this House has acknowledged the importance of bee-keepers and the role they play in the New Zealand economy they are not often the first people we think of when we think of the primary production sector. Certainly without bees to pollinate the clover which carries out the important environmental act of fixing nitrogen in the soil we would be in a very dire situation indeed. With the varroa bee mite wiping out the feral bee population our bee-keepers have felt under some pressure as have bee-keepers around the world. 
It is important to acknowledge that this situation is not unique to New Zealand. We have seen particularly in countries like the United States that bee-keepers now charge for their services as do bee-keepers here. I believe that kiwifruit pollination is often paid for. A lot of bee-keepers in America have moved to doing that; they have not been able to make a lot of money from selling the honey itself so they have moved to making money from the pollination service that the bees provide. I join everyone here in acknowledging the very important role that bee-keepers play. 
But at the same time I also know as a former member of the Primary Production Committee that we need to be equally careful on the other side of the coin. That very important balance needs to be protected and preserved in whatever work goes on at the select committee. I was very pleased to hear the Minister for Biosecurity acknowledge that the bee-keepers had taken a judicial review and had achieved a result that meant that the import health standard that had been introduced that would have allowed Australian honey into New Zealand was put on hold for the time being. That is not to say it would have stayed that way had the Environmental Risk Management Authority gone through the process; the authority may well have gone through the process and the import health standard would have taken effect. 
Effectively the stay that was put on that import health standard will not be there when this legislation is passed. I was pleased to hear the Minister acknowledge that it is rare that we pass legislation in this House that does that but unfortunately that Court of Appeal decision has thrown up some very difficult circumstances with far-reaching implications for import health standards. I know again as a former member of the Primary Production Committee that one of the biggest criticisms we always had of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry whenever it came before us for a financial review was the length of time taken to process import health standards. The threat of judicial review hanging over every single import health standard that came before the ministry could only lengthen the time it took because the ministry would want to make sure that it was going through the proper process. It also would mean that everything would be held up in the courts for a lot longer—every import health standard could possibly be judicially reviewed. I agree with the Minister that it is only right that this Parliament confirms what we always believed to be the case under the hazardous substances and new organisms legislation: that organisms unintentionally brought into the country were not meant to be covered by that legislation. 
I remember when we first went through the import health standard process with the bee-keepers. It was a process that I was quite involved in; local bee-keepers had come to me for assistance. As the Minister will well remember we had a number of meetings in his office where we challenged ministry officials on the questions that bee-keepers were asking about the efficacy of heat treatment of honey to remove European foulbrood which is the disease that was worrying the bee-keepers. As members have rightly pointed out we have a thriving manuka honey industry and if we have to start dosing our hives with antibiotics that will damage it. The ministry officials had really done their homework. As we have seen the science was backing up and backing up meaning that the Australians were saying to us that they can now prove that heat treatment kills foulbrood and that Western Australia does not have it. Just as we have found with our case to export apples to Australia where our scientific evidence has been showing time and time again that adult apples cannot carry fire blight it became very very difficult for us as a matter of trade to continue to keep a product out when the science was telling us overwhelmingly that there was no risk there that heat treatment would kill foulbrood. 
I find it interesting that the judicial review was not taken on European foulbrood; it was taken on a companion bacterium. Initially I understood that it would be European foulbrood that would be challenged. I do not know whether that is telling. I know that the bee-keepers were worried that one of their expert witnesses had not been taken enough account of and I can only assume that they felt that that challenge would not have held up in a court of law because it was not the step that was taken here. 
I would like some clarification from the next National Party member as to whether we have seen quite a significant shift in National’s trade policy and it is now saying that we should have exceptions in certain areas to not allow certain products in—for example Australian honey. The feeling I was getting from the National Party was that its members were saying that actually we do not need to be so pure on this. The line that we have always taken has been that we do actually need to be pure. We are a very small country. We have a very open market. 
Hon David Carter 
: A matter of balance. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Well it is a matter of balance absolutely. But the fact is that we cannot stand up in the World Trade Organization and criticise a country for ignoring our scientific evidence if we are doing exactly the same thing in the other direction. It has always been the understanding that we have to make sure the science could back up whatever position we took on trade. The process of bringing that science forward was not challenged in the judicial review and I can only assume that that is the reason—[ 
Interruption 
] Eric Roy is primed ready to leap to his feet. I assume that that is the only reason that that case was not taken. 
This is not an easy issue. I acknowledge the work that the bee-keepers did in bringing this case forward but unfortunately it has thrown up a number of very difficult issues that we do need to deal with very quickly. The interpretation that the Court of Appeal has taken is not the understanding of this Parliament. I look forward to this bill being passed very quickly so that the Primary Production Committee can get back to challenging the ministry on why its import health standard process is taking so long. I commend this bill to the House.