Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country) (remote): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to have you on board as one of our Assistant Speakers in Parliament and it's a pleasure to speak on this bill tonight. I want to congratulate Steph Lewis on bringing it forward and it's been good to be part of the Primary Production Committee as we've been working it through. And given that we are on biosecurity tonight and incoming aircraft I'm just going to let you know that I'm going to be winging this speech to some extent. This morning I was actually on a 3½ hour extended Zoom call didn't get to Parliament by the allotted 10.30 time haven't been able to get in to get my notes or my computer and I have been winging it all day on my phone. So it's been a rather unusual bill to go with because we started it in lockdown and I remember sitting in my house when we were locked down during August and September and taking in submissions which were very good. So I really do thank Steph for her level of detail. The second thing is that I saw the most recent bill on safe zones actually tonight and I thought Oh I've got plenty of time." and all of a sudden I had to get my jacket back on and get in front of the screen so I really am literally winging it. But what I do want to say is that biosecurity is really really important to our country. And thank you Steph for pointing out the fact that in terms of agriculture it really is a saving grace. You know there's a whole lot of things that can get into our country right from diseases like you know fruit flies and things like stink bugs that sneak in in vehicles and can actually ruin our whole horticulture industry. We've got to be careful that we don't bring in things for our animal industries like foot-and-mouth. We did have obviously a big case of Mycoplasma bovis which we still don't actually know how that got in. So it was a biosecurity issue but we still don't actually know how it got into the country but it created a lot—a lot—of stress and effort for farmers and actually was probably in some ways in terms of tracking and tracing a precursor for what we're now facing with our own COVID in human species. And I want to thank the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) for all the work that they've done with the Ministry of Health in terms of helping them around tracking and tracing because we might be different animals but when we're tracking and tracing diseases it works out the same. I also want to make note during this while we are talking about biosecurity that one of the things I think about is that as we closed the border a lot of people were redeployed into other parts of MPI or redeployed into other jobs. I often think about that as we are reopening the borders now it's going to be ever-important that we make sure that those people are deployed back to the borders where they need to be because as more and more passengers start to come in—and it's really important they do—we're going to find ourselves in a space where we're going to need those people back on the borders again and looking after us. I want to thank all the submitters for their submissions. In particular one of the things I did want to mention that we had quite a long discussion about was yes it's great to collect all the information and it's great to make sure that we know what's going on but we did have particular submissions from Air New Zealand and others who looked at the level of paper we might use not only in terms of it's a massive weight to carry a lot more paper but also when you start looking at what we're trying to do in climate change—and we're trying to reduce our emissions and make things a bit more favourable for the environment—the last thing we want to be doing is taking down more trees and producing more paper so that we can get more incoming passengers filling in paper forms and then at the end of the day once those are recorded then we're going to have to find some other way of destroying them. So just looking at absolute practical ways to do that. MPI and others were right across that. So it was really as much making what we do as practical as absolutely possible as we could without undermining the importance of what Steph was trying to achieve and make sure that we keep our borders as safe as we possibly can. So I wish you all well in the House tonight. I'm going to stop there and recommend the bill to the House because I really am winging it. I'm sure there's people in the House tonight that have got all their notes in front of them and are going to do a much better job than I have but I commend this bill to the House."