Guy Nathan: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGuy Nathan: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19182. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries):It is great to take a call in this debate on the appropriations. I want to say what a fantastic year it has been for primary industries. Just in the last couple of weeks we have released a document the Situation and Outlook for Primary Industries 2014 which records that our primary sector is in boom times—a nearly $38 billion return. Is that not fantastic?Andrew Little: Why are you ripping off farm workers?Hon NATHAN GUY: Andrew Little chips in. He would not know one end of a cow from the other even though he is standing in the New Plymouth electorate. Labour does not care about the rural communities. I want to take Andrew Little and Labour and the Green Party through why the primary sector is so vitally important to the New Zealand economy. As I was saying $38 billion was returned from our exporters in our primary industries this year. Is that not fantastic? Dairy is up to around $17 billion. Meat and wool are up to and through $8 billion which is fantastic and is forecast to return 22 percent out to 2018. Then of course we have the forestry sector. There are boom record times for it—$5.1 billion. Horticulture is going strongly with $3.6 billion in terms of its exports. It is forecast to go to $4 billion by 2016. And we should not forget about our seafood exporters who do a fantastic job of producing a quality product that goes all around the world at $1.45 billion.But of course we cannot have a big-growth target of doubling our exports to $64 billion by 2025 without focusing on protecting our primary industries and that is why I am excited about Vote Primary Industries. It is strengthening the core systems for biosecurity and for food safety. We are putting more resources into our overseas footprint. I want to talk specifically about biosecurity because it is my No. 1 priority as Minister for Primary Industries. We have doubled the funding since 2000 in biosecurity and there is more funding in this Budget. What we have also done is roll out 12 new X-ray machines. We have trained more front-line quarantine inspectors—125 were trained in the last 18 months including new dog detector teams. What we have also done is introduce Government-industry agreements and we have had the first signing of the deed with the kiwifruit industry.What we have also done in just the last few weeks is announce $65 million for a new biocontainment facility at Wallaceville in the Hutt Valley. It has gone down fantastically well with those in the primary sector because they know that we need to have our testing regime up to international best practice. They know that $20 billion worth of animals and animal product exports is the result of our farmers and the fantastic work that they do. This is the insurance premium and policy for the next 30 years for our primary sector—to know that we have world-leading and best-practice scientists doing the testing for exotic animal diseases.The other important thing is of course that we have the opportunity to grow Māori agribusiness in New Zealand. We did a study about a year and a half ago that confirmed that 1.5 million hectares in New Zealand is Māori freehold land and the opportunity for Māori to work closely with the Government to lift their overall performance is huge. We are talking about $8 billion in terms of export returns and we are talking about 3600 jobs.The Green Party and Labour do not like talking about irrigation because they do not believe in it. They do not believe in rural communities. They do not believe in jobs and exports but we on this side of the Chamber do. We believe that irrigation is good.David Shearer: Subsidies.Hon NATHAN GUY: We believe that irrigation is good and I will tell you why. Mr Shearer might be interested in this because he would not understand rural communities. There are 400000 hectares of land that could be under irrigation that is not under it currently and the size of the prize here is $4 billion. The other important thing about irrigation is that it is good for the environment and the reason it is good for the environment is that you take the pressure off the aquifers. You can store water—we collect and store only 2 percent of the water in this country; the other 98 percent goes into the streams and rivers and heads out to sea—and we have got numerous cases up and down the country particularly in the South Island where as a result of irrigation rural towns have been repopulated and schools have benefited as have businesses and the New Zealand economy.