King Colin: National Animal Identification and Tracing Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
King Colin: National Animal Identification and Tracing Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 07 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:127. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
COLIN KING (National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to speak during the Committee stage of the National Animal Identification and Tracing Bill. The bill in its title certainly gives us a lot of comfort in New Zealand but as this bill progressed to the stage that it is at now there was a lot of disquiet. The public debate around it emanated right back from 2002 when Ian Corney the then Federated Farmers chairman of the New Zealand Meat and Fibre Producers Council pulled together a group. It was all very collegial early on but as things progressed there was that normal muddying of the waters that happens in New Zealand not only around farming but around all sorts of things. You have only got to look at the debate around the Food Bill; it does come in for a fair bit of kicking around.  
At the end of it one has to have faith in the process and my faith in this process was certainly strengthened with the work the contributions made by submissions and by the Primary Production Committee.  
We are at a stage now where we can comfortably and with some level of certainty implement this bill into law in due course but let us not think that it is all going to be that easy and straightforward. The responsibilities that will go upon those people when this becomes law which they will carry upon their shoulders are quite significant. It is probably a blessing in disguise that initially we are not including sheep. I say that with some consideration because just implementing cattle is going to be enough for the first 3 years in my view.  
It was necessary to give this bill as it came forward a fair amount of consideration. You have got to think about it working in reverse—think about the farmer or the shepherd working in that high country situation. When you look at some of the purposes cattle are used for you see they are not just sitting in nicely flat green paddocks in the Waikato; they are pushing into scrub-covered hill country. There is going to have to be a lot of accuracy responsibility and dedication to this programme to keep its integrity. I just want to put that on record. In the winter months when you are short of grass you put your breeding cows and your calves and that less important stock into those areas of the farm to keep them open. There will be loss of tags and there will need to be accountability back to this legislation so that those people administering it can have certainty that it is robust. If it is not it is not worth the paper it is written on.  
We have had the TB situation which is right up there and has been controversial at times but we are headed in the right direction with it.  
Just to give a bit of a flavour as to where we sell our beef I say that 230000 tonnes of it goes into the United States. It goes in under a quota system and it goes in as what we call manufacturing beef. It is ground up and blended with all sorts of other types of product and we eat it in hamburgers. One sort of scratches one’s head and thinks “Well how do we actually use the traceability model around that?”. It certainly leaves questions that have got to be asked because that has got to be one of the commodity meats that is most used in the world. However if we have got a very robust system back here in New Zealand and we can trace that product right back through to the producer then the system has got integrity.  
The dairy farming situation is reasonably simple. The average herd size in New Zealand is about 300 cows; bear in mind that it is the same size as for deer. But when we look at the sheep farming side of it the economic unit for the number of sheep today would be anything up to about 3000 to 5000 and it really would present some very challenging situations.  
The amount of meat we actually sell into Europe is 1350 tonnes and the majority of that came out of the expansion of the EU. So we do not actually sell a lot of meat into the European Union. We do sell ever-increasing amounts into Asia however; Korea and Taiwan are very sophisticated markets that demand traceability and good quality food safety.  
But probably the most important thing coming back to my initial comment is the naming of the bill. It is a tracing bill. One thing that I really see is that it bridges a lot of gaps in our biosecurity and is just so very important. I believe that it will put us right up at the front end of the food quality system because over all our red fibre production—our meat fibres—that we sell to the world we have the platinum level of food safety. We have really got to keep on pushing forward so that we maintain that leadership role. We are a small economy and if we were to be hit severely by a food safety scare it would affect our economy considerably.  
So when we look at it why was it not introduced by the companies? I mean that is probably an argument that my politics might have naturally driven. If it is such a good idea why do the companies not do it? The reason why we have taken the stand we have and why it is going to be legislated for is that it is very inclusive. It has got to be mandated by the Crown otherwise when you are doing nation-to-nation negotiations it would not have the level of credibility that one would expect.  
It is a wonderful bill. It has had a lot of refinements. I do not believe that the time it has taken to get to this stage has been time wasted. I think myself that the acceptance of it out in the farming community is far better now. There is better education. There is a lot more work to go on with and I look forward to the third reading and its final implementation into law. On that basis this is very very important legislation and this is a very important day for primary production. Thank you.