Patterson MarkMARK PATTERSON (NZ First): It's a pleasure to rise in this appropriations debate for the primary industries and of course as we all know this is the most important of the appropriations because in this House we spend a lot of time debating how we're going to allocate funding. This is how we earn the money.I commend the Minister of Agriculture on the leadership he's showing in this sector but I also would like to just acknowledge the chair of our Primary Production Committee David Bennett. As the previous speaker Mr Walker has alluded it is quite a bipartisan committee and I witnessed something quite extraordinary tonight. The Hon David Bennett got up and made quite a diplomatic speech in terms of his representation of what happened. It's a side of him I hadn't seen before. The last time I saw him attempt diplomacy was when the Welsh Minister for Communities turned up in a diplomatic mission looking at Brexit and how the Welsh farming community can come through that particular thing and the honourable member gave her a five-minute lecture on the evils of subsidies. That was his previous effort at diplomacy so it's good to see that moving along. Can I say that when we are talking about the primary sector—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Can we now come to the Estimates. Just briefly sort of mention the Estimates.MARK PATTERSON: —yes the Estimates—it is the M. bovis; M. bovis is hanging over this sector. It has dominated our thinking and as the Minister said to those farmers our thoughts are with them. I just want to articulate something that happened. What I've seen from the Minister actually is—in fact I witnessed it on Saturday night. I got an email through on my phone at 9:45 p.m. at night. An M. bovis farmer had contacted him personally to express some concerns and he was replying to it at 9:45 p.m. on a Saturday night and I think that typifies the heart and soul that he's putting into this.But in terms of the appropriations there are a few things. Of course Minister Jones gave an outstanding presentation on the billion trees strategy. What a nation-building effort that is going to be as we seek to make our Paris Agreement commitments and take responsibility for our own emissions. Mr Walker can say it's going to cost farmers $5000 or $10000—I'm not sure how he knows that. That commission has not come back. But we do need to face those responsibilities and this Government is prepared to take those hard decisions. As the Minister said before Land Information New Zealand—and what a shame I think we had 465000 hectares of land transferred into foreign ownership in 2016 and we are taking some action on that. We have tightened those criteria and having to go down to the 5 hectares to notify and make it have identifiable benefits and it's about time that happened too. We're on the side of young New Zealanders.The other side that we've talked about is the Primary Sector Council. I've heard a little bit about this today in disparaging tones from across the Chamber and I will say how wrong they are. The Minister and I were at the Red Meat Sector Conference yesterday and the theme of that was disruptive technology and I will take a bit of issue with the soon-to-be member for Wairarapa that's sitting next to me Kieran McAnulty—this is a challenge for our industry that we do need to meet. And there were all sorts of things: blockchain and of course the aforementioned Impossible burger which seems to follow me everywhere. But we've got to look seriously at this stuff. We've got a $42 billion sector and $23 billion of that is still going out in raw commodities. There is massive scope for us to improve this and this Primary Sector Council is a cost-effective way of bringing the best brains in our industry together to look at those challenges. As I said at the start this is the sector that pays the bills so I think this is an incredibly important development.We also see within the appropriations the OVERSEER the investment in that—and that's very wise as we seek to meet our environmental expectations and our social licence to operate that programme that was never designed to be a regulatory tool but has developed. And it's great to see that we are putting some resource into that.The Sustainable Farming Fund—this is a Government that's looking at the big issues. We are looking to not just the next focus group but to the next 10 20 50 and 100 years. So I'm looking forward to continuing on with the good progress that this Government's making under primary industries.