Browning Steffan: Dairy Industry Restructuring Amendment Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBrowning Steffan: Dairy Industry Restructuring Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:9999. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STEFFAN BROWNING (Green): It was a quiet squeaking. Now that I have the voice back I rise to speak to the Dairy Industry Restructuring Amendment Bill (No 2). I am very pleased to be supporting this bill. When the original bills around Trading Among Farmers were going through and in the discussions around that I felt that the 20 percent cap was in fact too high. But our support of this bill is really showing that we are prepared to see a compromise because we regard this issue so seriously.I think it is a very wise bill and it seems to be very disappointing that National members could not achieve the agreement needed within their group to support this bill. I am sure there was some division but not inside those walls and it is very disappointing that you are voting en bloc against it.The need for this bill is very high. The risk as has been pointed out of this being a thin end of a wedge towards the breakup of what is probably New Zealand’s most successful co-op Fonterra is high.It has already been shown and it has been spoken of here tonight about the overseas ownership. I will also point out that in the fairly recentFarmers Weekly when we are talking about unit prices on the stock exchange rising to above $8—the 15 percent rise in that particular week was 45 percent above the listing price. There are all sorts of pressures coming on around this. It could well be in terms of a weakness around the issues of the shareholders’ fund that farmers under pressure in a real crisis or even in a crisis contrived by investors or traders may change their stance on what the cap should be although they have got a 75 percent farmer vote. What pressures have we seen come on to other co-ops or collectives in the past? We have seen what happened to ENZA. We saw a major crack in ENZA and then a major hurt to the pipfruit industry of this country and it has not really recovered.We see that this same possibility could hit Fonterra and I think the Labour Party bill here was going some way towards ensuring that that could not run away very quickly. Sure the farmers have votes within Fonterra but unfortunately some of those on the board and certainly in the executive seem to have gone for a bit of a walk from where the real membership base has been and that shows even more the need for putting a cap in under this bill.I notice as well in terms of the risks of weakening the co-op the situation that the meat industry is in at the moment. It is clear that the meat industry is looking at modelssuch as Fonterra as a possibility to deal with its woes and it would be a shame to see the model that it might be looking at being weakened and not being strengthened by the possibility of this cap.There were enough real solutions for Fonterra. It could have done more retentions. It over-exaggerated the redemption risk well and truly. That would have been solved but it carried on and unfortunately the Government of the day bought into that and has allowed the Fonterra executive its way. The direction of Fonterra I believe needs questioning but the fundamental thing is that the co-op needs protecting and this bill would have gone some way towards doing that.In terms of the overseas ownership it is disappointing. What has happened was what we suggested might happen and yes it will just go the same way as the Mighty River Power thing. It seems that some would say that—