O'Connor Damien: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 31 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2741. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast—Tasman): I am recalling the passage of the original animal welfare bill in the late 1990s when my colleague Pete Hodgson took over from me. I was a member of the Primary Production Committee then as I am now. He though as a vet had a particular passion and skills in the area of animal welfare. So he took over and did a lot of the negotiating for Labour and now we have my colleague Mr Mallard who is spokesman for animal welfare but I remain the spokesman for primary industries. It is a healthy balance. He likes the poodles; I like the big dogs. I guess there is a different approach to it and as a farmer and as a representative of the primary sector I guess keeping some reality in this debate is really important. I think that generally Parliament has done a good job. I acknowledge the Minister in the chair the Hon Nathan Guy. He has had at a very late stage a flash of brilliance or wisdom and has introduced Supplementary Order Paper 69 which I think addresses the things my colleague Mr Mallard has been asking for as indeed has Mojo Mathers for some time. The Government is slow to learn but it does learn and I have to acknowledge that.As Trevor Mallard said our international reputation relies on our ability to care for animals properly. The finer points are that there are many who want to eat meat but do not want to slaughter animals. That is the reality the conundrum that faces many consumers I guess. They want to be the beneficiaries of a really good safe food system including good animal welfare. Indeed that is what they expect and at the end of the day there are some realities some harsh realities of course around the slaughter of animals for consumption that we have to continue to allow be it in relation to hens or to the production of pork or beef. We just have to make sure that we keep the right balance. Indeed the issue of exemptions and the time frame to allow those practices to be phased out is a very important issue. We acknowledge that there are practices that we have now accepted are unacceptable—if you would like to include that contradiction I guess—so we want to phase them out over time.Let us take sow stalls for example. They were introduced to protect the piglets of course so they would not get squashed. A harsh reality of pig farming is that many of those young piglets do get squashed in an uncontrolled environment. However 50 percent of the pork in this country comes from production systems that do not use sow stalls so we need time to ensure that the rest of the pork industry can transition to the phase-out of those sow stalls. Indeed that was an agreement early on. The National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee has accepted that. There were recommendations and we say that although the Government has extended the time there should have been a commitment to that phase-out period which was 2015 I think originally.None the less the Government has eased off on some of those things and with that easing-off comes a risk to our international reputation. We have moved in the area of the export of live animals. We have banned that practice until we get robust or absolute guarantees of the safety of those animals. Some ask of course for their treatment to be monitored in the export market to which we send them.Consumers are ultimately the people who will drive this. There are ethical obligations for us of course as humans to look after animals but as a country dependent upon the production of food we have to make sure we meet consumers’ expectations. I have before me here a recent report from Lincoln University which was investigating maximising export returns and consumer behaviours and trends. In China India and the UK all of our export markets all those consumers basically said they would pay more for a product that came from systems that had robust animal welfare regimes in them. They have actually quantified it. The report notes for example that in Sweden and Denmark a 4 percent premium could be obtained for beef products where there were good animal welfare standards 32 to 96 percent for pork and 36 to 112 percent for chicken—more for outdoor housing access. There are now many scientific and well-researched figures that back up the value for New Zealand of having the very best animal welfare system in place.There is a concern—and my colleague referred to it—as to how we oversee this. The Minister is in charge of a Government department called the Ministry for Primary Industries. It is a big organisation. It is charged with the oversight of forestry fishing farming horticulture biosecurity food safety and indeed animal welfare. It is Labour’s view that that is too broad a range of responsibilities and I think we have seen the ministry and the Minister fail in terms of their oversight in the area of biosecurity and indeed in food safety. We hope that it does not fail too much in animal welfare because all of those three crucial areas must be maintained in terms of the standards the regulations upheld and our reputation which is integral to our ongoing export of food from the country. I think there are some real risks because of the structure of the Ministry for Primary Industries and the Minister’s oversight and the fact that the Government has not funded them properly.So in the passage of this bill and the implementation of better and more up-to-date standards I hope that we can ensure that the standards can be policed properly. In fact out in the domestic area and in farming areas the ministry is relying on the SPCA to go out to monitor to alert and sometimes to enforce these regulations. I do not think that is necessarily good enough for an organisation that relies to a large extent on voluntary funding.We in Labour will support the passage of this legislation but there will be issues we raise along the way. One of the things put forward of course is that if we have a very robust sound animal welfare regime in this country then we should be proud of it and indeed market it and get some value as identified in this report from the market place. But this Government refuses to accept country-of-origin labelling for products made and produced in this country. It is head in the sand stuff for the Minister to advocate for the best production systems but not to acknowledge that and promote that in a way that delivers a benefit from it to the farmers to the pork producers to the chicken producers.So what I say to the Minister is that he should perhaps follow through with this more robust animal welfare regime and ensure country-of-origin labelling to meet the requirements across the Tasman in Australia—we normally have trans-Tasman food regulations—which would say to the farmers of whatever beef or pork or chicken that if you have abided by this new set of regulations and the passage of this legislation then you deserve to have a premium for your product. That is where this Government is failing the producers in New Zealand. It will impose upon them through the passage of this legislation often additional costs that we believe collectively as Parliament are necessary to uphold our reputation. But to then not offer those same producers a benefit to offset that cost is in our view irresponsible. The Government has played I think an odd role in taking a hands-off approach to country-of-origin labelling when it has had a hands-on approach to all of these other necessary areas in food production.Can I just say that there are a number of issues for the farming sector that need to be considered. They will not be addressed directly in this legislation. They are things such as the housing or the pastoral production of beef and milk across the country. There is increasing scrutiny of systems within New Zealand as to how we are producing our milk and beef and whether we are going to actually get as I say a premium from pastoral production. We now have people putting a lot of dairy production in housing or part housing and some of them in fact have full-time housing of cows. So the question of whether that then does put us at risk is something that I think the ministry has to look at. Very briefly the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee—