Browning Steffan: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBrowning Steffan: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 05 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3162. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STEFFAN BROWNING (Green): I am pleased to be able to speak to the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill and congratulate those involved with getting the improvements into the bill particularly my colleague Mojo Mathers. What I want to see when this legislation is fully enacted is other elements of animal welfare law that are already enacted put into practice by this Government. I am thinking particularly as I speak tonight of the hundreds of cows that died from the herbicide-tolerant swede issue in Southland the many many more that were visibly ill and the many many more with subclinical issues. So poor was the condition of some of the surviving cows that there was a question of their suitability as culled cows for processing.I have been looking at some Official Information Act material on this. There is what they call a natural toxin that seems to be the cause of the distress of these cows. This was a serious animal welfare issue. Was that product which clearly is at the base of this issue withdrawn? Was it banned? Or was there a cover-up? There was a cover-up. We still do not have a proper report on what happened last winter and into early spring to those cows in Southland. The only way we can find anything is through Official Information Act material and in that I find the very valid questions that I put to the Minister and I see how they were treated as just generalisations. It says that if the group is asked about this it should just stick to these messages and not go down the track of trying to answer any questions.There is a chemical involved here as well. It is not just the glucosinolates—we call them GSLs for short as everybody else does for good reason. A glucosinolate is natural toxin. It forms in the leaves of swedes and other brassicas. It can get to quite high levels and under certain conditions it can get to a toxic level. But what we find here is that the herbicide-tolerant swedes have way more than the non - herbicide tolerant swedes. The glucosinolate levels are 4 to 16 milligrams per kilo in the leaves—the bulbs are lower down on the ground 1 to 4 milligrams per kilo—but non - herbicide tolerant ones are just 1 milligram. Something is going on in PGG Wrightson’s Cleancrop system with swedes at least and we are not too sure about the turnips rape and other products under that system. It cheated New Zealanders and it cheated farmers by going down a system of production of those herbicide-tolerant ones and by dodging the genetic engineering route that it already had for that same product through a chemical mutagenesis thing—just as much a DNA muck up—so that it did not have to go through the Environmental Protection Authority and be open to submissions and testing for safety. PGG Wrightson dodged it and this Government has let it dodge it.This is an animal welfare issue. It is also an issue for the people who consume the products from those animals and for the other animal products in this country from animals that are fed products containing lots of herbicides whether it be glyphosate or whether it be chlorothalonil which is in these herbicide tolerant swedes and is banned in China. In here in the Official Information Act stuff I find that they are saying: “Is there enough other herbicide if we move away from these crops?”. They are so locked into PGG Wrightson’s crop. We have got to change the way we farm. We have to go down the organic route and this Government has got to help with regulation for the organic sector. Thank you.