O'Connor Damien: Biosecurity Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
O'Connor Damien: Biosecurity Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 19 July 2012. Volume:681;Page:3783. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman) 
: 
 I will take an opportunity to lead in again on Part 1 which is basically the big part of the Biosecurity Law Reform Bill—the significant part of it. It sets up requirements around pest-management strategies which are the plans I guess to get rid of or manage diseases that are already here such as tuberculosis. Strategies for others will be developed. Ones around rabbit calicivirus disease or the rabbit as a pest hopefully will be developed further down the track.  
Can I say on behalf of my electorate in particular that one of the obligations in this bill that I have to endorse and applaud the Government for is the good neighbour obligation in here. It does place upon the Crown as the neighbour of many farmers and private property owners an obligation to engage with them through these pest-management strategies and to be a participant just like every other private farmer and landowner. I applaud that initiative.  
At the same time I have to go back and alert anyone who might be listening to this debate to the fact that although Labour supports this bill we have some serious questions. In regard to the Government-industry agreements what I must point to—and there will be a lot of people out there who have not read the report—is the review of the import requirements and the border process in light of the entry of  
Pseudomonas syringae 
 pv.  
Actinidiae 
 into New Zealand. One of the recommendations in that—and I hope it is not taken up—is that the Ministry for Primary Industries needs to look at the relative cost-benefit ratios of reprioritising its resources towards managing risks for economically significant industries. One of the concerns of the small sector groups—the likes of hothouse growers; pipfruit is not a small one but summer fruit is and avocados—is that they do not think that under the Government-industry agreements they will get a fair go and an opportunity for them to negotiate an affordable deal to manage any risk incursion or in fact to have input into the preventive measures at the border. The point being that here is a recommendation that points to the insufficient resourcing in biosecurity and says: “Well if you do not have money reprioritise and forget about the small sectors.” That is effectively what it says.  
There may well be net benefits in reprioritising the Ministry for Primary Industries’ resources away from smaller less strategic industries in order to ensure the risks to high-value sectors are appropriately managed. What that says is that we will put the resources into dairy kiwifruit pipfruit and meat and we will forget about the rest. Well those sectors need to be well aware of the dangers. Under the current Government’s management of biosecurity there is insufficient resource to have a proper system and the shifting around of those resources may very well mean that they miss out.  
The recent incursion of fruit fly is a classic example. I guess it would have been the whole fruit sector engaged under an MIA—a GIA sorry; I am getting my MIAs and GIAs confused here as it is not the Meat Industry Association but a Government-industry agreement—then I am not sure how we would engage. Thankfully there was quick action on that—the one fly—at a cost of $1.4 million. That issue was addressed. We did not have a wider spread of the Queensland fruit fly thankfully. But you have got sectors here like summer fruit that are crying out for the ministry to X-ray all incoming baggage into the country because somehow that larva got into this country and we did not pick it up at the border.  
There are hundreds of thousands of containers coming into this country every year and they are not checked. There are hundreds of thousands of visitors coming into this country each year and they are not checked. Direct exit means that those people go out without any physical check whatsoever. The vague hope the vain hope that the dogs are around to check it out in fact does not apply to Wellington—has not applied since October last year—and there have been serious shortages of dogs around the ports and airports of this country for some time. I understand that the ministry might be upping it by four in Auckland but we have a serious—