Groser Tim: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGroser Tim: General Debate[Sitting date: 14 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7210. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon TIM GROSER (Minister of Trade): As the country starts a process of sifting through from nonsense to reality—and it will take some time; we have just had an outstanding illustration of encyclopaedic ignorance—I would just like to thank at this early stage the many many New Zealand officials who have gone just about to the ends of the earth to defend New Zealand’s interests. I will mention only two of them: the two chief negotiators who have been advising me since I held the Minister of Trade title. They are two outstanding New Zealanders: Mark Sinclair our current ambassador in Tokyo and Dr David Walker. But through them of course I want to extend our thanks to the many many New Zealand officials from numerous agencies—the Ministry of Health Te Puni Kōkiri the Attorney-General the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade the Ministry for Primary Industries and many others—for their incredible personal dedication to this.Having said that it did cost a pretty penny to do it. I do not think we have ever had as many New Zealand officials go to as many meetings. I can tell you thanks to a question that Dr Russel Norman provided me—I have given him the written answer this morning—we can actually tell the House how much it cost. The figure for 3 years of all travel accommodation and airfares was $3655163.18.So the question is: how are we going to pay for this? And the answer is: béchamel sauce is going to pay for this. You see—I just need to get some body language from you Mr Speaker because I do not know whether you are—when you are in gay Paris parlez-vous Franҫais? But—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member needs to be very careful not to bring the Speaker into this debate. My French—Hon TIM GROSER: Actually it is white sauce. White sauce is what it is in English. It is from tariff line HS2103.90.13 and that does not include the big kahunas of mustard ketchup and mayonnaise. But the beautiful thing about white sauce—which I did not even know we produced let alone exported until yesterday because we did not start this negotiation thinking “We have got to do something for white sauce makers in New Zealand.”—is that in the first year alone the tariff savings on white sauce to one country Japan are $3.96 million. They are doing God’s work here in Aotearoa our white sauce manufacturers whoever they are.But of course there is a lot more than just: “So is this $4 million for corporate greed?”. Well hang on a minute—how will we make white sauce? According to my understanding what you do is you need some flour. If it is farmers in New Zealand producing the flour at the margin this is going to create—as we expand our white sauce exports to Japan—more jobs and more income. And if it does not produce more jobs it will be higher productivity. But if it is imported there will be truck drivers driving more flour to wherever it is that this is made. There will be people inside the factory who have to put it into containers. There will be accountants in Hamilton or wherever who will have increased demand for their services. This is how the real economy of New Zealand creates wealth creates jobs and creates opportunities for our country.I will give you another example: apples to Mexico. We export a rather pathetically small total of apples to Mexico—500 tonnes—and the reason why our exports are very very small to Mexico has got nothing to do with the quality of New Zealand apples. I do not want to start a diplomatic incident by describing what I think of American apples but anyone who has ever eaten one will have their own view. The apples from Hawke’s Bay and Nelson are the finest apples in the world but they have not been able to compete in the Mexican market—a market of 118 million people—because the United States has had a preference and the United States exports 300000 tonnes of apples to Mexico. So I do not know what our guys will do but if we are still exporting only 500 tonnes in 5 years’ time I will be astonished.