Street Maryan: State-Owned Enterprises (AgriQuality Limited and Asure New Zealand Limited) Bill — First Reading 
Street Maryan: State-Owned Enterprises (AgriQuality Limited and Asure New Zealand Limited) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:638;Page:8561] 
MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I rise to speak to the State-Owned Enterprises (AgriQuality Limited and Asure New Zealand Limited) Bill 2007. I thank the member opposite Shane Ardern for his comments and I look forward to the National Party’s constructive contribution at the Commerce Committee when it is considering this bill. 
The two entitiesAgriQuality and Asure New Zealand were as has been traversed already established in November 1998 but I think it is important to remember what the functions of the two organisations were in order to work out the sense of now contemplating a merger. The AgriQuality core business was the provision of food safety and biosecurity services—that is its business was to inspect live meat as it were—whereas Asure New Zealand inspected dead meat or processed meat. Those two functions were important and perhaps in their day justified establishing separate organisations—although personally I would query that as well; I am not sure whether it was altogether sensible to separate out those two functions. It was as though in 1998 the corporatisation model was being extrapolated out to another level again beyond that to which it was originally intended to apply. It is one thing to create a State-owned enterprise for the purpose of establishing greater efficiencies in delivering public services but then to split those out into two different organisations with different functions was a kind of atomisation of the process that really did not stack up or has not stacked up in recent times. 
I want to traverse a little of that history. The corporatisation move was established under the fourth Labour Government in the 1980s and it resulted in a lot of improved efficiencies in businesses that were core business of the State. Certainly when the key export earner of the economy is agriculture it is right and proper that the State has a direct and hands-on function in the administration and quality supervision of that part of the economy. But to separate out the functions into two different organisations—and for my own understanding more than for anything else I refer to them as live meat and dead meat; people will understand what I mean by that: the meat inspectors and the inspection of processed meat—was to carry corporatisation to an extreme. 
It becomes important to say that a number of things have changed in the intervening years. There are two things that make the consideration of a merger and therefore this bill that is in front of Parliament a sensible suggestion and a sensible proposition from the Government. First of all consumers now require higher and more transparent standards of quality than they used to. Although that is no reflection on the standards that were met in the past it does mean that if two State entities were to compete with each other—which is the proposition that gave rise to this bill—then the interests of consumers are not likely to be observed or met in that instance. The second thing that has become important in the course of the intervening years has been the need to track meat—the need to track live and processed meat in order to be able to determine in the event of a biosecurity risk the precise herd from which a piece of processed meat has come and therefore to go back to that particular farmer and that particular herd and contain any identified risk. 
The images that will come into the minds of the public in the consideration of this bill will be those ghastly images from the late 1990s of the burning of herds in the United Kingdom which showed the need to track back exactly where the biosecurity risks came from. My colleague on the other side of the House referred also to the recent putative outbreak of foot-and-mouth on Waiheke Island. That is a very good contemporary example. Although of course it came to nothing it was an essential test. 
It is the view of the Government that creating the possibility for these two Crown entities to merge will in fact provide a greater efficiency in that if there ever were a need to separate out the two functions the time has long since passed for that to be the most effective way to administer the quality standards we need not only to assure consumers here and abroad but also to maintain the integrity of our biosecurity protections in New Zealand. Those twin challenges have emerged over the last few years—the higher expectations of consumers and the need to identify contain and sheet back to its origins any biosecurity risk. 
The purpose of this bill is to put into legislation a way of preventing these two bodies from competing with each other in the provision of export red meat inspection services and to allow for the merging of the two organisations at some point. It is interesting and pertinent to note that the Public Service Association (PSA)# welcomes the announcement of this legislation. The PSA national secretary Richard Wagstaff has stated: “The benefits to PSA members at these enterprises and the New Zealand taxpayer will be significant. It’s a common-sense solution to issues that hamper efficiency and effectiveness.” He went on to state that the two enterprises must provide an integrated service in order to protect New Zealand’s biosecurity interests that that is almost impossible to achieve if the two organisations are running against each other head-to-head in competition so a merger will promote a more strategic and responsive capacity to address biosecurity threats. I welcome those comments because the PSA represents almost totally the workers who work in both organisations and they have been the ones who have experienced some career instability and uncertainty which has affected recruitment and retention. Certainly their endorsement of the potential merger of the two organisations is significant in that it comes from those who are the experts within the two organisations. 
In conclusion I think it will become obvious what the benefits of the potential merger are. I look forward to debating this matter when it comes before the Commerce Committee. Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker.