Veterinarians Bill

Greetings, Mr Assistant Speaker—meri Kirihimete! Ngā mihi nunui ki a koe te tangata e hāpai ana i te reo Māori i tēnei taha o te Whare, i te kaha koretake o tērā taha mō te reo Māori. Me mihi ahau ki a koe.

[An interpretation in English was given to the House.]

[Merry Christmas! Absolutely huge acknowledgments to you, the person who promotes the Māori language on this side of the House, because that side is absolutely hopeless with it. I really have to tip my hat to you.]

I do need to redeem myself slightly; some members are endeavouring to change the deep prejudice and the deep bias that emerged during the election campaign. One imagines that they are practising te reo Māori so that they can apply it to the pets they own, which might need the attention of the Veterinarians Bill.

But I think I need to make a small improvement on last night because, unwittingly, I did demean the animal kingdom. I made the unwise observation of comparing a number of the members opposite with members of the animal kingdom. I did warn about guarding the crotch, in terms of the “Tigger from Tauranga”, and I did warn about a bird—a “Peachey Parrot”—causing near death to itself by pecking itself in the back; I will not continue in that vein. However, the Veterinarians Bill—[Interruption] I am not entirely sure whether they are edible, but certain members will be on a very raw diet on the other side of the House, so who knows what they will consume.

The family pet—who, in the early months of next year, will no doubt need the assistance of the vet to be put down—sits on the front bench. Actually, if he does not need the assistance of a vet, he could draw on the assistance of the one or three doctors on that side of the House. Let us hope that they are experts in pathology, because they will be endeavouring to breathe life into a virtual corpse of a political character.

However, let me return to the Veterinarians Bill. Veterinarians work in a profession that we stand very proudly to support by introducing and shepherding this bill through. The brand of the profession must be protected and safeguarded. We do not want to see the profession undermined—as many other guilds, trades, and professions were as a consequence of failed policies in the 1990s.

I also make reference to the fact that there was a very, very sensible suggestion made regarding the creation of a board that has a combination of professional vets and a number of lay people. Members have made a range of very silly, childish remarks—which were reflective of the very shallow pool that their rhetoric was being drawn from at that late hour yesterday—but that board will have a very important role overseeing the monitoring, the stewardship, and the full-time development of the veterinary profession.

There is this foolish notion that only those who were swept into Parliament in certain rural areas can speak about these matters. It is difficult to speak with any authority when one is an obscure back-bencher in Opposition, and is likely to stay there for the foreseeable future. The place to speak from with authority, actually, is on the side of those who enjoy the power of the Treasury benches.

All the braying in the world, from either the donkey or any other character, will not make any difference if one does not enjoy the authority of the Treasury benches to shepherd through particularly important legislation like this—as well as the student loan legislation, which will be of great assistance to the veterinary profession. Not only will it enable veterinary students to pass with distinction but it will also help the profession, although far be it from me to say whether vets might get an early Christmas. [Interruption]. I listen to all this noise and wonder whether a hydatids dosing is necessary; there is too much frothing coming from the other side of the House.

Ēngari taku mihi mutunga ki a koe, e te tiamana, kia kaha, hāpaingia te reo Māori. Kia tau ngā manaakitanga. Ko te wikitōria kei konei, ko rātou kei te ngaro. Kia ora tātou!

[An interpretation in English was given to the House.]

[But my final tribute to you, Mr Assistant Speaker, is this: persevere. Promote the Māori language. Blessings upon you. It is here where the victory is; they are missing out. Greetings to us!]

New Zealand First supports the Veterinarians Bill and is pleased to see it pass. I congratulate the members of the Primary Production Committee, some of whom have left Parliament and some of whom are no longer on the committee, including myself, and I am a bit sad about that because it was a committee that I enjoyed immensely. In the spirit of good cheer and Christmas, I want to congratulate the chair, David Carter, who had a lot of work to do. This bill, as members found during the Committee stage had extensive re-writing in the select committee, and I think—well, there is no think about it—the bill is better for that. I have to say that the chair brought in a couple of innovative moves as in putting officials and veterinary representatives together, which I believe has to be tightly controlled, and the chairman did that. I think it has to have tight parameters around it, but if those two things are taken into account, I believe that the outcome is a far better and far more workable bill, and, importantly for this House, far harder for the participants in the industry to criticise in future years. So I commend him for doing that and I commend the rest of the committee for the great job they did.

This bill in many ways modernises the Acts that veterinarians operate under. It respects the fact that many of our people are going overseas and are not returning in the numbers that we would like, and it is being far more accepting of qualifications that are earned in other countries and applied in New Zealand, without a whole lot of fuss and bother. It brings those people into the fold and accepts the differences in their qualifications while still upholding the standards that are so essential to our industry.

I think it was Mr Lindsay Tisch who mentioned yesterday that we talk largely of veterinarians on farms. We talk about the small-animal practices they have, including the family member Bianca that we talked about yesterday. But vets are, of course, critical to our export industry and it is only their professionalism and their standing that allows our meat, which is such a big part of our trade, to go offshore without those horrible things called non-tariff barriers that apply in other countries and that they are only too ready to put on our products.

It is interesting, as we spend a bit of time in this House and move around the different committees, to see that there are different cultures in those committees, and it is amazing how, even with those different cultures in those committees, and in different parties in those committees, people still apply themselves to the matters in hand. I think sometimes that it is unfortunate the public cannot get more of an overview of that than they do of this particular place that we are standing in at the present time, which is very confrontational, but the select committees tend to be much less so. We work in cooperation—and none more so than the Primary Production Committee, where we all know the importance of exporting, we all know the importance of farming for the future of this country, and we all work diligently to make sure that that is not interrupted in any way and to make sure that we retain the clean, green image, to use a cliché, that we have spent so many years attaining for New Zealand. I think that not one member of that committee is unaware of that, or takes it lightly, and even though in my time there was certainly a bit of joking around, the work still got done.

I am still New Zealand First’s spokesperson on agriculture and I will be speaking to these bills in the future. But I will not be at the Primary Production Committee, so I want to mention a person who gave us a bit of excitement over the last years at that committee. That was our friend Ian Ewen-Street, who during a select committee inquiry took off, to use my language, with the learned counsel who was sitting before the committee—and a very charming and wonderful lady she is. She, Sue, may be listening. With due respect, we just did not expect that of Ian Ewen-Street, but there was much backslapping and congratulations when that came to light. It did not do a lot for his career, I must say—and that is a warning to all the rest of us, who may look around the place. But they are a charming couple, and we wish them well. In his valedictory, Ian Ewen-Street sort of landed me in the messy stuff a little bit, for which I will never forgive him, but for my part I look on it as a prank that had long-lasting repercussions. Nevertheless, it was meant in good heart.

So that committee was a great committee to be on. Its members did sterling work, and still do sterling work, and this Veterinarians Bill is proof of that. It is a bill that has been gone over in the biggest possible way, and lots of it has been rewritten, but that has all been done with the intention of making it work better. There is no better example of cooperative select committee diligence and hard work than that of this bill. For my small part in it I commend it to the House, and I hope that it serves the veterinary profession well.

I place on record that the Green Party supports the Veterinarians Bill and, indeed, the veterinary profession. Despite the lengthy and tedious filibuster we have experienced over the past 24 hours on this bill, I believe, in fact, that all parties in this House support the legislation, and that all the hundreds and hundreds of amendments by the National Party were just part of some little game. I have not quite understood what it was all about; they were certainly not serious amendments but just part of a filibuster. So now we have a bill that I think every party in this House supports, and we hope it will achieve its various objectives, including that of protecting the reputation of practising vets. Indeed, their brand has been mentioned a number of times, as though everything in the world has come down now to brands.

The interesting thing about veterinarians is that almost every vet I know—and, I am sure, that most vets—cares deeply about animals. Most people who go into the veterinary profession do so because they have a great affinity for animals. Certainly, I could sing the praises of all the vets who have helped to keep our 18-year-old cat alive, and I think we could all sing the praises—and they have been sung endlessly in the House over the last 24 hours—of individual veterinarians.

But there is a mystery that I would like to comment on—that is, why veterinarians, who have a great affinity with animals, are silent when it comes to major and important issues of cruelty towards various animals. In particular, I am thinking of the cruel and shameful conditions that hens, pigs, and chickens have to endure in New Zealand.

💬 David Bennett: And fish.

The member is right—some fish in their cages, as well. I am absolutely convinced that most veterinarians would feel as repelled and horrified as I do, or in fact as anybody would who actually visited, for example, factories and saw hens stuck in cages with a space the size of a piece of A4 paper to move around in. It is a grim, Orwellian sight. The hens cannot express any natural forms of behaviour. They cannot even extend their wings. They are kept in conditions of misery that it would not be an exaggeration to say are verging on torture.

Pigs—highly, highly sociable animals—are stuck in their sow crates, unable to turn round, and just standing there. That is all they can do day after day—those highly, highly intelligent, sociable animals, who can, in experiments, play games on computers with joysticks. To see those highly intelligent and sociable creatures stuck behind bars, unable to move, and just chewing their bars in desperation, would make most veterinarians feel repelled—as indeed I believe any member of this House would feel, if he or she cared to go inside and observe the conditions those animals are kept in. They would feel that that is a very grave blot on New Zealand’s landscape, and that we should not in this day and age, in the 21st century, be keeping animals in conditions that can only be called cruel.

So it is a mystery to me, when I am certain that most vets are opposed to those practices, why the organisations and councils that represent them are silent, for the most part, about them. We look to veterinarians to speak up on behalf of the animal kingdom, and I am sure that if they were not silent but spoke up, those cruel practices would come to a swift end. But, in fact, it is their silence that enables those horrendous conditions to continue in our midst.

That is why the Greens are particularly keen on the new functions of the Veterinary Council of New Zealand, and its prime, No. 1 function—that is, to advise and make recommendations to the Minister on any matter relating to veterinarians and the practice of veterinary science. Councillors now have a mandate to give specific advice to the Minister on any matter of veterinary science, and surely now, after years of silence, they will find their voice and see that mandate as an obligation on them to speak up for the animal kingdom—for those animals that have no voice in this Parliament. A veterinarian’s livelihood is based upon looking after animals and seeing that they are well cared for.

So I look forward to hearing that the Veterinary Council has made recommendations to the Minister of Agriculture to get rid of sow crates from New Zealand, and to get rid of cages where hens are jammed into spaces with an area less than the size of an A4 sheet of paper in which to move, and also to look at the whole issue of keeping 20,000 to 40,000 chickens that we eat for meat jammed into windowless sheds, where for much of the time they have very little room to move around and where they are continuously fed antibiotics in low doses for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, even though they are not sick.

Of course, we know, and every veterinarian in New Zealand knows, that that particular practice is shameful and that it puts the health of future generations of New Zealanders at risk. If we wanted to have an experiment in creating and developing antibiotic resistance, we would continuously feed millions of animals low doses of antibiotics. This practice is producing antibiotic resistance. Up to 50 percent of chickens tested have antibiotic-resistant bacteria on them. When we eat them we, in turn, can take on board those antibiotic-resistant bacteria and, of course, those bacteria can pass to other bacteria in our stomachs, and so on. It is a shameful practice, it has been banned in many countries overseas, and I do think it is time we acknowledged that this practice is putting the health of New Zealand at risk.

It is up to veterinarians to take the lead on this issue because, after all, a small number of veterinarians are filling out the prescriptions and allowing—recommending, in fact—millions of chickens to be fed antibiotics continuously, which they do not need because they are not even sick. I have no problem with giving antibiotics to any animal that is sick, but I do have a huge problem with feeding antibiotics continuously to any animal that is not sick, basically, to make that animal grow more quickly and to prevent disease from sweeping through flocks.

Other countries have banned that practice because they realise the huge risk that overuse of antibiotics places on our future. More and more diseases are becoming resistant to antibiotics, and we are facing a future where we will not be able to treat many diseases with antibiotics. When we face that future, people will look back and ask why we allowed that practice to happen, and why veterinarians stayed silent about that practice and allowed it to continue by filling out prescriptions that allowed it to happen. They will also ask why the Veterinary Council of New Zealand did not take the lead in getting rid of this and other shameful practices, such as the keeping of animals in cages in conditions that could really be described only as torture.

The Greens strongly support this bill. We are very hopeful that the new role of the Veterinary Council, in making recommendations to the Minister and in giving advice on any matter relating to veterinary science, will result in the Veterinary Council and the veterinary profession at long last finding their voices on those issues, taking a lead, and getting rid of some of the shameful cruelty that millions of animals in New Zealand still have to endure.

I would like to begin this speech on the third reading of the Veterinarians Bill from United Future’s point of view by saying that I agree with the sentiments that Sue Kedgley has just expressed in relation to the way in which we look after animals such as pigs and chickens in this country. I think if I had been born a chicken, I would have preferred to be able to range around in the open air from time to time, and do all the things that chickens do. They do a bit of scratching, hunting, and pecking. [Interruption]

Keeping chickens sometimes reminds me a little of Parliament, because chickens certainly are quick to find a pecking order. They get rather peckish towards each other on many occasions, which bring to mind some of the other images that members sometimes see in this House. I think, similarly, if I was born a pig, I would like to do my share of the rolling in mud, the rooting, and so forth, instead of being confined in a little cage with a concrete floor. As our society comes to understand more and more about animals, I would imagine that this House will address those issues in due time. So I wish Sue Kedgley all the best with those endeavours.

In my electorate of Rongotai, we have a very large veterinary practice called—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Your electorate? The member is Annette King.

Well, it is my electorate. I live there, I work there, and I do good things for it. So I am very proud—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: She’s a King—what does that make the member?

The Hon Trevor Mallard would know more about that subject perhaps than others in the House would, but I do not think we will go there at the moment. I did not say I was the member for Rongotai; I just said it is my electorate, and it is where I contested the election. But we have a wonderful veterinary practice there called Animalz, which has started a whole new chain of large veterinary practices around the country. Allan Probert, who is the dynamic entrepreneurial businessman behind it, has made it into a great success. It is like a cross between a zoo and a veterinary practice, because there are so many different animals there.

I think that, for whatever reason, the number of cats in New Zealand now vastly exceeds the number of dogs. That is certainly true in Miramar. When I go for my nightly strolls, I have a lot of fun stopping now and then to stroke various moggies that want to accompany me down the street and up the trails in my beautiful suburb. I can tell people on authority that I have not seen a cat come out of Peter Jackson’s house yet, but I walk past that house every night. So I offer my congratulations today to Peter Jackson on the very sensitive way that he has portrayed a gorilla in a certain movie that premiered here in Wellington last night.

I would also like to make a comment about the general welfare of animals in this country. United Future has a policy, which we will be progressing under our confidence and supply agreement, to do with the planting of trees on marginal strips around rivers and lakes. We call it a “no regrets” policy because it has so many great benefits to the country. Trees live on nitrates, so we deal with nitrate runoffs. We add a lot more to our clean, green image, and we also provide more shelter for animals—which brings me back to the bill. I think it is true that veterinarians should have a very broad view of the welfare of animals. It is good to see some trends emerging in our farming practices where that is also being taken into account, and people are beginning to realise it.

Let me give an example. During the election campaign, I spent quite a bit of time in Southland—and I know my colleague Eric Roy will know something about this—which had the best lambing season over the last spring that it has ever had. One of the things Southland has done as a new practice is to minimise human interaction with ewes during the lambing process. Instead, farmers are leaving a cluster of tussock in their paddocks, because they have found that ewes like to tuck under those tussocks at the time they are lambing. Without human beings being involved, farmers are finding the outcomes are very good. It is also adding to productivity because, of course, it reduces the cost of human intervention. So I think there will be some good spin-offs for animals coming from that process of planting trees.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: There’s been a bit of modification there, too—the sheep are nearly cows.

Oh, there is a little bit of genetic modification going on there, as well. I have not actually seen a species quite like that yet. I think I can picture it, though; we would have to milk it on our knees—which is probably not a bad thing for those who pray in the morning.

So for all those sorts of reasons, I have the pleasure of signalling United Future’s support for the Veterinarians Bill in its third reading, and I wish the vets in this country all the very best in the important work that they do for the welfare of millions of our animals.

Bill read a third time.