Browning Steffan: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBrowning Steffan: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 27 August 2013. Volume:693;Page:13069. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STEFFAN BROWNING (Green): I rise to speak to the first reading of the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill. The Green Party is supporting it going to the select committee. We want New Zealand to be world leaders in ethical food production.A friend in the National Party said that he saw this as an enabling bill but we have to be very very careful that this bill does not rest at a level of just enough and that it is not just seen as a bill minimis as such. We have to reflect that in the rural scene and our farming scene there are systematic practices on our working animals that really have to be looked at very very hard. We have to lift the game on those because we are getting too many bad stories. But it is actually still our average. Can we lift our average up a bit to be something that absolutely everyone rural and urban can be very very proud of?Animal products as stated earlier make up 45 percent of our export income. Our economy is underpinned by these animals particularly these working animals. We also know very very well what international expectations are around food safety for example how much that expectation is rising how important that is and how closely we are being regarded. Animal welfare is similar and it must be rapidly improved to ensure that it is not the nextClostridium dicyandiamideendosulfan - type event.Photos of cages or mistreated dairy animals are not ambiguous. An image is way way less likely to be seen as a false positive as we might get in some food safety issues. Our clean green “100% Pure” branding and ethical stature means that this bill mustensure the absolute best possible outcomes that translate into something that New Zealanders rural and urban can be very very proud of.Live animal exports are intended to be managed through regulations through this legislation. Let us look at stopping the live export of animals for slaughter full stop. Let us have a look at that. In the select committee I think we will see some submissions that will give us good cause to do that.Why are some of these exemptions that are foreshadowed in this bill seen to be acceptable? We need transitions that are not indefinite; we need transitions that have a very clear and short-term cap on them. It has been mentioned already that in section 183A(5) inserted by clause 56 of the bill we have reviews. Those reviews must be much shorter as a mandatory than 10 years but we actually need caps in there.Also it has been mentioned around psychoactive drugs testing on animals. It was appalling that the submitters could not present to the full cross-section of the House their submissions that they had made in good faith around psychoactive drugs. The speaker from National compared this: do we test on young people or animals? There is absolutely no need to test on either. That is something that came out of the submissions to the Green Party which listened to those submissions. We do not need to do either. We can deal with the psychoactive drugs testing very very quickly—short and sharp.Research is one other issue. We have to think of the genetically engineered animals up at Ruakura where they struggle to get 5 to 10 percent of inseminations to come through to live births. Often it is zero out of a batch. There are “goys” up there—goats. They call them “goys”—females in a boy’s body. They come out as young male goats and are induced into milking at 9 months by hormone treatment and the like. The number of abortions and the issues up there are appalling.These are things that we can address very very well through this bill if we put enough emphasis on them. We can make a significant change through this legislation. As we say we support it going to the select committee and look forward to hearing the submissions on that. Thank you.