McClay ToddHon TODD McCLAY (Minister of Agriculture): Mr Chair thank you so much. Colleagues there's been a range of questions and I'll try and address them as quickly as I can. Of course many will know this is a time-limited debate and therefore the time available to Ministers is much less than we want. I'm going to try and answer them very very quickly and my apologies if I don't get to them we can always come back.Of course we've got my two colleagues Minister Hoggard and Minister Patterson here who have specific responsibilities. Minister Patterson in this case for wool and he'll be able to address that. We've heard from Minister Hoggard on biosecurity and of course on animal welfare.I can give an assurance that there will be no cuts to the front line of service for the equivalent of the vets or the animal welfare experts who are there in the field or biosecurity experts. But that doesn't mean there are not going to be changes across the board. The reason for that is over the last six years we saw the workforce grow by 50 percent in the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) but the output didn't increase by 50 percent. And ultimately what we're saying is we want to focus on the front line and do what most farmers in New Zealand are doing—and in fact every New Zealander that I can think of is doing—is having to do more with the same amount or with less.But I can give the assurance again as I did in the House as I will today that those front-line services not back office but those front-line services—in as far as the vets who do a very important job our biosecurity officers and also animal welfare officers—remain the same.Of course colleagues you will have seen the announcement there just at the end of last week from MPI now that they've gone through their full consultation process. And indeed they have moved resource from what they had proposed into biosecurity and to another area of engagement with the rural community and catchment groups because they had feedback that more was needed to ensure that we could deliver in those areas. And they've taken that feedback on board.In as far as Māori business and agriculture is concerned ultimately where the changes to the amount of resource that's being spent decisions made will come forward in the Budget. But again I can give an assurance that in all areas we have not closed down units. What we've done is we've had to accommodate changes done so in such a way as the main delivery can continue and the work that's important will continue. And then as the Government gets to rebuild the economy we can make bids in the future after engaging with members of the House and with the sector about where additional resource would be needed to be able to do more.In some of the questions here around GMOs and so on as Minister I'm not responsible for that; that's Minister of science and research however. But what I can say when it comes to biotechnology and so on that actually there will be opportunities for us to meet environmental and climate change obligations through adopting and using new technologies. But in so doing we must make sure that they don't harm New Zealand that they're good for New Zealand and that they are accepted and being used in other parts of the world. So the Minister I know is doing a body of work there to meet the commitment we made before the election. But we're doing so mindfully in as far as we want to give the rural committee the tools that they need that are available to them through new technologies to meet those demands—environment climate change. Take wilding pines as an example; there will be an opportunity for us to make the changes so that wilding pines no longer are a threat to native bush in New Zealand. We should be open to that but we need to get those rules right.Forestry was raised by one of our colleagues. You're right that the forecast of revenue exports in forestry is down. That's the result of a commodity price being down and the logs are worth less at the moment than they were previously. But ultimately you are right there are opportunities for us to look into lean into wood processing. What you won't see this Government doing is what was tried in the past. They've taken large amounts of taxpayer money and saying to the wood-processing sector We give this to you to just do what you're doing." Actually what we want to do is work with them to be innovative to find where the obstacles to them finding and using new products are and how we can use more wood in New Zealand and add value to it. It's good for climate change it's good for the economy it creates jobs it'll be very very good for exports. But we're starting to work with the sector about how we would do that. In all cases it's actually not often always about just the money that you spend it's about the restrictions that are placed upon them and how we can get more for that. But we're taking that very seriously.In as far as slash is concerned we're breaking the work up into a couple of areas. One the slash is there at the moment; how we get that cleaned up as quickly as we can in partnership with people in the region as opposed to us in Wellington deciding how it should be done. Secondly the woodland biomass that's on the hills what we can do to make sure it doesn't come down to mitigate that.The third part of this must be the rules in the future so that the likelihood of this happening again lessens. But the member asked about resource. The Government has committed $85 million. We're going to make sure as much of that is used as well as it can to get as much wood up as we can. We owe that to the taxpayer and certainly the ratepayer in those areas. I'll stop here to reserve some time for my other colleagues and other questions."