Woolerton R Doug: Veterinarians Bill — Third Reading 
Woolerton R Doug: Veterinarians Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:628;Page:978] 
R DOUG WOOLERTON (NZ First) 
: 
 New Zealand First supports the Veterinarians Bill and is pleased to see it pass. I congratulate the members of the Primary Production Committee some of whom have left Parliament and some of whom are no longer on the committee including myself and I am a bit sad about that because it was a committee that I enjoyed immensely. In the spirit of good cheer and Christmas I want to congratulate the chair David Carter who had a lot of work to do. This bill as members found during the Committee stage had extensive re-writing in the select committee and I think—well there is no think about it—the bill is better for that. I have to say that the chair brought in a couple of innovative moves as in putting officials and veterinary representatives together which I believe has to be tightly controlled and the chairman did that. I think it has to have tight parameters around it but if those two things are taken into account I believe that the outcome is a far better and far more workable bill and importantly for this House far harder for the participants in the industry to criticise in future years. So I commend him for doing that and I commend the rest of the committee for the great job they did. 
This bill in many ways modernises the Acts that veterinarians operate under. It respects the fact that many of our people are going overseas and are not returning in the numbers that we would like and it is being far more accepting of qualifications that are earned in other countries and applied in New Zealand without a whole lot of fuss and bother. It brings those people into the fold and accepts the differences in their qualifications while still upholding the standards that are so essential to our industry. 
I think it was Mr Lindsay Tisch who mentioned yesterday that we talk largely of veterinarians on farms. We talk about the small-animal practices they have including the family member Bianca that we talked about yesterday. But vets are of course critical to our export industry and it is only their professionalism and their standing that allows our meat which is such a big part of our trade to go offshore without those horrible things called non-tariff barriers that apply in other countries and that they are only too ready to put on our products. 
It is interesting as we spend a bit of time in this House and move around the different committees to see that there are different cultures in those committees and it is amazing how even with those different cultures in those committees and in different parties in those committees people still apply themselves to the matters in hand. I think sometimes that it is unfortunate the public cannot get more of an overview of that than they do of this particular place that we are standing in at the present time which is very confrontational but the select committees tend to be much less so. We work in cooperation—and none more so than the Primary Production Committee where we all know the importance of exporting we all know the importance of farming for the future of this country and we all work diligently to make sure that that is not interrupted in any way and to make sure that we retain the clean green image to use a cliché that we have spent so many years attaining for New Zealand. I think that not one member of that committee is unaware of that or takes it lightly and even though in my time there was certainly a bit of joking around the work still got done. 
I am still New Zealand First’s spokesperson on agriculture and I will be speaking to these bills in the future. But I will not be at the Primary Production Committee so I want to mention a person who gave us a bit of excitement over the last years at that committee. That was our friend Ian Ewen-Street who during a select committee inquiry took off to use my language with the learned counsel who was sitting before the committee—and a very charming and wonderful lady she is. She Sue may be listening. With due respect we just did not expect that of Ian Ewen-Street but there was much backslapping and congratulations when that came to light. It did not do a lot for his career I must say—and that is a warning to all the rest of us who may look around the place. But they are a charming couple and we wish them well. In his valedictory Ian Ewen-Street sort of landed me in the messy stuff a little bit for which I will never forgive him but for my part I look on it as a prank that had long-lasting repercussions. Nevertheless it was meant in good heart. 
So that committee was a great committee to be on. Its members did sterling work and still do sterling work and this Veterinarians Bill is proof of that. It is a bill that has been gone over in the biggest possible way and lots of it has been rewritten but that has all been done with the intention of making it work better. There is no better example of cooperative select committee diligence and hard work than that of this bill. For my small part in it I commend it to the House and I hope that it serves the veterinary profession well.