Beaumont Carol: Food Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBeaumont Carol: Food Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 27 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18348. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour): It is a pleasure to speak on what is—as others right across this House have said and I agree with them—a very important bill theFood Bill. Of course we are supporting this bill. Just putting it in context food is like shelter. It is a fundamental human need. It is an area where we require good regulation and others have talked about how outdated our legislation in this area has become and said that this was well and truly needed. It has taken a very long time to get here but we have got a comprehensive review and we all agree that in most regards this bill provides a useful and modern piece of legislation for what is not only an important human need—the need to eat—but also for us a very important source of our national wealth.I do want to say that the regulation in this area—and it is a bit like the consumer credit area which we are going to be speaking about next—is supported by Labour as a result of work that was started by Labour but it has had a very long gestation. I am not sure whether there are significant consequences as a result of the delays on this bill. I guess that others who were on the Primary Production Committee may be better placed to answer that particular question but certainly delays with the consumer credit legislation have had dire consequences for families and that will be a matter for us to talk about later this evening.Despite that we now have legislation as I say that replaces other legislation and that will replace other related legislation and regulations to create a modern piece of legislation with flexibility and that is appropriate to the diversity and complexity that is the food sector. Others have talked about our needing to look at dimensions around the production of food the processing of food the serving and retailing of food the importing and exporting of food and along the whole supply chain related to all of those areas. So it is quite a complex and significant area and that presumably accounts for the size of this bill.Food is an interesting issue in a country that is becoming increasingly unequal. I do want to note given that we are talking about food that for struggling families food has sadly become a discretionary item. It is hard to imagine really but food has become the bit of a household budget that people can reduce and they sometimes reduce it to an extent that is almost hard to imagine especially for people like the people in this House tonight. But some families are cutting back their expenditure on food to such an extent that it is hard to imagine how they are having a balanced nutritional set of meals in their house and in fact many times they are not.Why has it become discretionary? Well because you cannot change the accommodation costs you face and we know that the housing costs have been going upwards. I come from Auckland and accommodation costs there are huge so that takes a fair chunk of household income. Of course this is in the context of low wages for many people. So if housing prices are going up and 46 percent of people are not getting a pay increase you can see where the squeeze comes. As a country I think it is really to our shame that we see that children are having to be provided with food in schools—breakfast lunch—because there are children going to school without food. I do think that when we are talking about the Food Bill it is important to note some of those important matters.I just want to come back and say that this bill does substantially reform the regulatory regime for the safety and suitability of food and others have explained far more eloquently than I can about the risk regime that is being covered in this legislation. It is very important that we do that. We need to know that the food that we eat is safe. We need to know that the food that we produce and send to others to eat is safe. As has been said the food and beverage sector of our economy is huge. It is still huge to this day. We have an important comparative advantage in this area. It has been the lifeblood of this country and it remains so.There is a question—and it is a question that I believe is really significant—about whether we are looking at this sector in the right way and whether we are doing enough to lift the value in the sector to look at innovation and to ensure that we are moving to a value-added kind of thing rather than continuing to just sell milk powder. Are we looking at and doing enough to develop things like nutraceuticals? Are we looking at some of the areas where we can further process food—and in doing so create work here in this country—to ensure that we can get better prices for the food that we export? My view is that it is another area where the Government is failing to look enough at the Government’s role in economic development. What is the Government’s role in trying to make sure that we really go for the value-add in the food and beverage industry?But none the less food is worth 52 percent of our exports so it is hugely significant. People come to this country and even do food tourism or certainly even if they are not specifically doing food tourism part of the package of coming to this beautiful country is to eat some of the wonderful food that we produce here. So it is important not only for the money that we earn as a country; the domestic market is also of course significant. We need food to survive but of course food also has another dimension around hospitality and recreation. We share food with friends and family. We enjoy food. So I am glad to see that some of the concerns that were raised around sausage sizzles and the like have been dealt with by the select committee. You know I think that it was important that we got that balance right.For the food that we sell it is important that we have a hugely positive reputation in this area. We cannot—any of us—take any satisfaction from when our reputation as a food-exporting country is damaged. Of course we have had some recent occurrences that have not served us well and the whole country potentially suffers as a consequence of that if it is significant. I do think that the work around food safety has been important. I want to acknowledge the role of my colleague the Hon Damien O’Connor. I acknowledge him for the work he has done in making sure that we are very vocal about this and that we are saying that the way that things are set up at the moment is not right. The hurdles are high for our country. Other countries demand a lot from us in the food that we export. Particularly the high-end markets—the Japanese market the European market—demand high standards from us and we need to have a regulatory regime that stacks up against that.I want to finish by talking about the demands of consumers. I am Labour’s consumer affairs spokesperson. Internationally consumers are driving some of the regulation in the food and beverage sector particularly through the global supermarket companies. These food companies are hugely dominant global corporates. They are requiring more and more of us and of other countries and that includes being really clear about traceability being really clear about what is in food being clear about the safety regime and of course being clear about the origin of food. Country-of-origin labelling is important and it serves us well because we do still have a good reputation as a country for our safety and our quality of food. The fact that things come from New Zealand probably earns us extra money for those products. That is important.But I want to talk also about the need to have country-of-origin labelling that serves domestic consumers as well. This is why I think it is a real shame that that is not in this bill and that Damien O’Connor’s Supplementary Order Paper 440 was not supported. This is the way we need to move. All around the world country-of-origin labelling is becoming required. Our Australian colleagues with whom we share a standards code the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code have country-of-origin labelling. We need to do more. Frankly it is not good enough to just say “Oh well it’s too complicated.” which I think an earlier speaker said and “It’s not possible due to the complexity.” Well actually it is possible and Labour will do it.