Shearer David: Food Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShearer David: Food Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 14 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17853. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): It is good to be able to stand and speak on the Food Bill. It is a hefty tome of a bill and I guess that speaks to the time that it took to go through the Primary Production Committee and the 570-odd submissions that were presented to the committee in order to cover it. This bill was introduced on 26 May 2010. It was more than 2 years in 2013 until it came back here and now we are still going through it in the Committee stage. We support this bill. Labour believes this is a step forward and that it clarifies considerably the issues around food safety. As the Minister for Food Safety points out and we completely agree with her New Zealand should have the highest standards of food safety because our economy depends on it. The scare around botulism last year emphasised that a scare around that sort of issue can have an enormous impact on our ability to export and on the way that we are perceived across the world.This bill I think successfully balances the need for safety on the one hand with the need to preserve at the same time our way life. We talked about the sausage sizzle and the earlier possible requirement in the bill for those things to be heavily regulated and effectively regulated out of existence. I do not know how much campylobacter is spread through sausage sizzles but I like the idea on a Saturday morning when I am going around the sports teams in my electorate of picking up a breakfast snack from one of the charities that are around there in order to help them out. That is part of our way of life. So the fact that that has been balanced with the need for safety in our food is I think a step forward. The fact that small businesses will be able to save money on this in terms of their compliance costs is also a step forward.When we look at the Food Bill what it effectively does is to look more at the risk of what might happen in terms of handling food rather than at the actual businesses themselves that are affected. It looks at risk in terms of about five different areas. I just want to run through these very quickly because they are in and around the purpose of the bill. They are the food control plans around the control of food; national programmes to be implemented for medium and low-risk food handling; food handler guidance so those companies and others who will be handling food will be able to obtain guidance; monitoring obviously of those programmes which is absolutely necessary; and also a much clearer requirement set out for the issue around food imports. Obviously within that when you have got monitoring you are also going to have penalties and the penalties are updated as well as part of this lengthy tome. All in all this has been a good piece of work which has been done cooperatively across the select committee with good input from officials from what I understand although I was not serving on the committee and we have come up with a good piece of legislation that we are happy to support.But I want to come to the point that Damien O’Connor and Steffan Browning were just mentioning before which is the point about country of origin labelling. The Minister in the chair Nikki Kaye spoke to this and I have to say that her reply or response to this was a bit unconvincing. She said that we do not actually need this because 70 percent of our single-ingredient foods are already being looked after voluntarily. The issue is not really about the 70 percent that are being done so voluntarily; the issue is about the 30 percent of those foods that are not being looked at and their country of origin not being submitted because those are the ones that we have to worry about.I give as an example walking into your local fish shop. When I walk into our local fish shop my assumption up until fairly recently was that the fish in that shop were largely caught or harvested in New Zealand. I know that there are going to be certain standards. Actually that is a long way from the truth. It is a long way from the truth. The cheaper pieces of fish are actually sourced from places like Viet Nam where the fish are grown in ponds and fed hormones and a whole lot of other artificial products in order to grow them. They are brought to New Zealand and they are sold alongside New Zealand fish. I would like to see “Fish grown in Vietnam” clearly on the fish that we see in our fish shop but we are not seeing that because if you did that probably nobody would buy it. They would go for the New Zealand fish. The voluntary code is simply not working in the way that I believe—and New Zealanders have a right to believe—that it should.Then the Minister said that we can do it in another way rather than through this piece of legislation. As this is a comprehensive examination and regulation of our food industry in New Zealand why would you not put that into something like this bill in the form of a very simple Supplementary Order Paper rather than try to do it through some other means? On the one hand the Minister is saying that we do not need labelling because 70 percent of it is already done although the 30 percent that is not done is actually a real worry. On the other hand she said that if we do need it to be done—well does it need to be done or not—we can do it in some other way rather than this way. So the argument is very unconvincing. It is very unconvincing and I believe that what we should be doing is moving through with these Supplementary Order Papers and getting them through Parliament. What we need is for Peter Dunne to sign off on them and we can actually do that—and I would hope that he will actually be coming to the Committee later on to be able to help with that—so that we are able to have country of origin labelling that is clear and well set out for New Zealanders to see where their food is coming from.It is very simple. I believe we have a right to that and a right to enable that to happen. Although we have controversy elsewhere and the Minister says they are looking into country of origin food labelling in Australia let me just show you this chart here. People on television or anybody else might not be able to see this but this long column down here represents the list of countries that do have country of origin labelling. They include all of the OECD countries that we trade with. This small group here is the countries that do not have country of origin labelling. There are about a dozen of them. We are in the company of Guatemala Colombia Honduras Philippines and Viet Nam. Good old New Zealand is with them. Well if we are a food-exporting nation and we take food quality seriously then we should be in the other column. We should not be on this side of the ledger where countries are looking to us and asking why New Zealand cannot regulate its food industry in the same way that they can. So if these counties can do it why can we not do it?The Minister has been completely unconvincing in her argument that somehow it is not necessary because 70 percent of it is already done. Of course in relation to the 30 percent that is not done they are not doing it for the reason that it would discourage people from buying their products. Of course that is the case. So as a result of that for 30 percent of the products that we are buying in our shops nobody has any idea where they come from or what is actually inside them either. That is a whole other issue that I will bring up another day. I believe that although this is a good piece of legislation the country of origin labelling is a serious omission from what is otherwise a very good piece of legislation that could have actually advanced us up the chart and put us on the on the right side of the ledger with all the other countries in the OECD rather than languishing alongside Colombia Honduras and Viet Nam.