Woods Megan: Biosecurity Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Woods Megan: Biosecurity Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 19 July 2012. Volume:681;Page:3787. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram) 
: 
 I am very happy to take a call on the Biosecurity Law Reform Bill a substantial piece of legislation that seeks to amend the Biosecurity Act of 1993. Essentially one of the things that this bill seeks to do is to bring the legislation up to date with the technology that is available in terms of biosecurity in New Zealand.  
As my colleagues have talked about at length Labour does support this bill although we do have a couple of concerns which we have outlined one of which my colleague Damien O’Connor talked about earlier today. It was the Government-industry agreements and this is a concern for us. The other concern for us is that you can have the best legislation in the world but if you do not properly resource it it is not going to work.  
One of the things that my colleagues have talked about while we have been debating this bill is the lack of resourcing that we are seeing in this area of biosecurity. We are seeing that Wellington Airport has not had a sniffer dog working there since October last year. We are seeing that there are cuts and this is of concern to everybody. We support the efforts to increase our biosecurity because like most people or like everybody really in this House and most New Zealanders we know that historically New Zealand’s biosecurity and our protecting of our land-based primary production—our agricultural our forestry and our horticultural industries—is absolutely crucial to our economic survival and indeed our economic development. Not only has it been incredibly important to us historically as a nation but we see in Labour that it is still important to us today. It is very much part of our present.  
This bill does recognise the vital importance of biosecurity to our marine environment to our indigenous flora and fauna and to human health. I think it is interesting that we started debating this bill last night immediately after the reading of the exclusive economic zone legislation where we were seeing the House talking about how it is that we could control our exclusive economic zone. What we have here is a piece of legislation that seeks to extend into that exclusive economic zone. So the purpose of this bill as I said is to bring biosecurity up to date to take into account the technologies that are available and had been there since the passage of the legislation that was passed in the 1990s.  
The present bill that we have before us now really goes back to when Labour was in Government and the scare that the varroa mite posed to an entire industry. And sadly since we have seen the scare that the varroa mite posed to the honey industry we have seen several other scares which members have talked about during this debate. We have seen the  
Pseudomonas syringae 
 pv.  
Actinidiae 
 (Psa) incursion into the kiwifruit industry—a $75 million problem. We have seen the Queensland fruit fly in Auckland. All those actions posed significant threats to New Zealand’s economic well-being.  
The fruit fly alone could destroy a $3 billion a year horticultural industry. So these might be very small organisms or very small insects but they are not very small problems. These are things that we need to protect against. This is why Labour more than doubled the spending on biosecurity between 1999 and 2008. We raised that spending from $94 million to $187 million.  
Then in 2003 Labour initiated the  
New Zealand Biotechnology Strategy 
 and this was a very good piece of work. This strategy emphasised the critical role and this is what is really important for me. This is a strategy that emphasised the critical relationship between science and biosecurity and that science needed to underpin what we were doing in the area of protecting our borders and in terms of our whole biosecurity system.  
This strategy identified four expectations of science in the field of biosecurity. It emphasised that the science should be closely involved in the development of any strategy that the purchase of science should be integrated across providers who are working in this field that the investment in science should be long term to ensure maintenance of key capabilities and that the priority for research to improve biosecurity is understood. As someone who has worked in the research industry before entering this House I have seen very much that biosecurity was at the forefront of thinking in terms of our horticultural and our primary production industries.  
New technologies—many of which have been developed under this increased funding that I have sketched out—are now being used in defending our borders and the legislation that we have before us now actually will enable us to make greater use of these new technologies. It will ensure that a secure biosecurity system from pre-border management to pest management must be underpinned by this science that I was talking about to support the social the cultural the environmental and the economic values that are important to all of us as New Zealanders and that we must ensure that science continues to underpin our approach to this system.  
Our science in this area has a very strong international reputation in fruit fly protection in eradication techniques the use of baggage-securing X-ray technologies in fumigation technologies in pesticide technologies and in molecular diagnostic techniques. These are all things that New Zealand scientists excel at and that we do very good work at. We need to be able to use these technologies in the defence of our borders. We have examples of these technologies being used to protect our borders but we also have examples of these technologies being commercialised and that is a spin-off economic benefit to the New Zealand economy.  
We have SniffertechTM which was developed by the Crown research institute AgResearch and it went on to be a very useful technology. Biosecurity is a really salient example of the importance of investing in science to our economy right across the broad spectrum of how it is that we look at our economy. Our economic future is dependent on this and we must continue to innovate in this area. As I said the purpose of this bill is to enable us to use these innovations these new technologies and these new bits of science.  
The Biosecurity Act as it stands now does not reflect these significant advances in technologies that have taken place over the past decade and that we anticipate we will continue to make greater advances in. The present legislation requires that some of the acts be carried out in a manual way when time has moved on and we actually have technology that could do a better job at this and actually do more to protect our borders.  
For other functions there is uncertainty about whether the available or future electronic technologies and systems can be used to support the prevention of biosecurity risk. We must tidy that up and one of the reasons that Labour is supporting this bill is that it does precisely that. We need that legal certainty over the use of technology and over the use of electronic devices in defending our borders. The Ministry for Primary Industries needs to have that certainty to improve target and manage the risks at our borders. Visual inspection as required in many ways now will not pick up the organisms that pose the threat whether they are bacterial or viral such as Psa. We must have a way to detect these. We have the technologies and we must be able to use them. That is why Labour is supporting this bill at this reading. Thank you.