Eckhoff Gerrard: New Zealand Horticulture Export Authority Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Eckhoff Gerrard: New Zealand Horticulture Export Authority Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
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GERRARD ECKHOFF (ACT NZ) 
: 
 This bill as has been alluded to by other speakers is about an export-marketing strategy—amongst a few other minor details—for exports to a country called Australia. I have a couple of rhetorical questions I would like to ask any member of the House. What happens if the strategy is wrong—and indeed what happens if it is wrong over a period of years? I ask members to cast their minds back to just a few short years ago when we had an organisation called ENZA which was exporting New Zealand apple crops to the world and was getting good prices for a time. But what happened? It got fat and lazy. It did not bother getting out there and doing the yards doing the selling. The apple industry was absolutely brought to its knees. 
I have another question for any other member in this House. What is the marketing strategy of Zespri or the Kiwifruit Marketing Board for New Zealand? At the Coal Creek dairy I can find exactly the sort of fruit that every other member in this House is complaining about. I can buy second-grade or third-grade fruit in Coal Creek or in Alexandra or in any other part of this country yet the kiwifruit grower is not allowed to export that fruit to another country. That is absolutely nuts. I am sure that Mr Damien O’Connor will pick up on that and will probably take a call if he can to explain to us why the kiwifruit industry does not have a first-rate marketing strategy for our own country. 
R Doug Woolerton 
: It does—send the rubbish. 
GERRARD ECKHOFF 
: It does—there we go. Again I am slightly perplexed here. Why is it OK to sell second-grade or third-grade fruit to our own people but not OK to export it to Australia? 
I have another question for this House. If somebody decides to export a product to another country I would presume that that person had been paid for the product; who then owns the product? If I sell kiwifruit to my colleague on the other side of the House and he gives me some money for it who then owns the kiwifruit? I say that any exporter who wants to sell a product to another country will lose the marketing rights once that product is sold. When I hear this nonsense about how we have driven the market down because there is second-grade fruit there I think that I could probably take people to meet a few million Australians who are very happy to pay a lesser price because that is what they can afford. But they still like kiwifruit. They still like to put it on top of their pavlovas and they still like it for their early morning constitutionals—which is very important; that feature being one of the great attributes of kiwifruit. Why can we not export fruit of a lesser quality to allow those who have a lesser income to enjoy the fruit? Why do we have to sell just the top-quality fruit to those people and say: “If you can’t afford to buy our gold or green kiwifruit—tough! We’re not going to give you our slightly lesser grade fruit which might be slightly misshapen because Zespri says it does not like it.” 
It might come as a surprise to members of this House to learn the basis on which we sell other products overseas like our New Zealand wine. We sell New Zealand wine on the basis of quality and price. We have New Zealand wines side by side in shops in Australia the UK and throughout the world and a buyer can come along and say: “Gosh there’s a nice bottle of Cloudy Bay at $45 a bottle.”—or probably $85 a bottle in the case of that particular wine. Buyers could also buy a bottle of “Coal Creek Chateau Something-or-Other” for $15 or $100 a bottle. Our wine competes on price and quality. So why is kiwifruit so different? I am getting some sort of stunned silence here. I am asking some pretty fundamental questions and I am not really getting any answers. 
This bill is about a constraint on trade. I expect to hear from the Maori members on this. We have already heard Mr Woolerton speak of the Federation of Maori Authorities which demands the right—as it should—to sell its own fruit without having to get permission to do so from somebody in Wellington. Is that so wrong? What is so wrong about having the right to sell one’s own fruit wherever one wishes if one can find a market? 
I go back to ENZA. A few years ago the growers in Roxburgh complained because they had a bad year when the fruit did not swell up. They said: “We’ve got small apples and ENZA won’t take them. We’ve got to dump them or mulch them and feed them to the pigs.” An enterprising grower went to America knocked on the door of one of the education boards over there and said: “I’ve got these small apples. Is there a market in your school for them?”. Someone on the board said: “How many containers can you give us a week? Our children take one or two bites then bung the apple out.” 
So there is a market for everything. There is a market for second-grade wool for all sorts of purposes including carpet. We do not have to sell first-quality products all the time although we strive for that. Of course we want to hit the top but any of us who have been in the production game know that there are such things as seconds and that we cannot always achieve 100 percent quality whether we are growing wool beef kiwifruit or whatever. 
I come back to the fundamental question: if we are to have some sort of hybrid single desk for this produce why do we not have a similar thing for the meat industry as well? The answer is that we did and it was an abject disaster. It cost the Government of the country at the time millions upon millions of dollars to bail the industry out. It did not work. So why do we not have a wool export authority? Well we did and we had massive stockpiles of wool that we could not sell. It cost the industry; it put that particular industry back years. Again I come back to the principle behind this issue—that is that an individual an exporter or whomever it might be must have the right to export his or her product. Can members imagine for example the massive wall of radiata that we have in New Zealand right now having a single export authority—a timber export authority? And why not have one for cheese as well while we are about it? 
What I am trying to put to the House and to listeners to the radio is that the fundamental right of every grower and manufacturer in this country should be to have the opportunity to export their product whether it be first-grade or second-grade. If they so wish they find the market. The issue is not about flooding markets with poor-quality fruit. One can do that only for so long before one goes broke. There is no question that New Zealand has a reputation for producing quality food and I would demand that that reputation remains but we must also recognise that we do have seconds and that we can and should export those wherever people see fit. 
I make the point that to date Zespri has been a great success. So was ENZA a few years ago. Nobody is suggesting and I am certainly not suggesting that Zespri should be abandoned and the 83 percent of growers who wish to be within ENZA should disband—nothing like that at all. I am saying that the 17 percent of Maori authorities the indigenous people within that grouping who want to export their own fruit should not have to go cap in hand and present a marketing plan to ENZA or the Horticulture Export Authority. Again I come back to a fundamental principle—the right of every manufacturer and every grower to sell their own product.